Rollin,
I figured you were using OE and took that out of my reply. OE has a very poor reputation for security. Consider that Microsoft's "Windows One Care" security suite just came out on the bottom of the list in independent labratory evaluations of security software and that it's a good bit more advanced than what protects OE...
Demoguy,
No one has to send email addresses from this board to any spammer. They use crawlers and bots to harvest email addresses from any public board they can find. It's not uncommon for one spammer's bots to harvest more than 100,000 NEW addresses a day. And with character recognition software becoming more sophistocated, the common tricks for munging an email address will soon be useless.
Mike