It's not just about obfuscation. There are people behind corporate email gateways that have no control over the fact that their address must have a local part that gets quotes around it, for example. You are harming a very real populus that you cannot see, and I am standing for their rights to use your services. I can't tell you the number of web forms I've tried to fill out with even just my tagging email address of "merlyn.SOMETHING@stonehenge.com" so I can track where the address is sold, and it gets rejected by some lame web programmers excuse for a program who has only seen the alphabet on the left side of the "@".

So, this is not about obfuscation. That's a red herring. This is about real people, with real mail addresses that are far more characters than those that match \w. Do not shut them out just because you don't know one of them personally.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker