Does email address obfuscation actually work?

It's not the scrapers you should be worried about - it's all the people in your address book. See ending comments here:

http://www.exratione.com/2010/10/javascript-obfuscation-of-a...

While I'm certain that sophisticated DOM and Javascript aware web spiders exist and are presently operating - at Google at the very least - the computational requirements mean that in comparison to simple scrapers they are slower and more expensive to operate per page examined. The important question is whether or not they remain cost effective in terms of email address discovery: does the additional effort pull in enough email addresses per unit time to make it worth it? That is interesting to speculate on, a line of thinking that touches on changes in hardware cost and the spreading use of DOM-manipulating Javascript on the web, amongst other items. Now consider that amongst the people who have your email address in their address book, half a dozen have probably already cheerfully uploaded your address to a one or more of grasping online services, or fall victim to some other address book pillaging scam. Most of the people you send email to will have no incentive to keep your address private, and will hand it over to third parties without any conditions placed upon its use. From that starting point there are a hundred ways for an email address to make its way to the black hats and spam houses.