Preventing email spam
If you publish an email address on a website it can open up the possibility of E-mail address harvesting. There are a number of techniques for publishing an email link on the web that can make it more difficult for spammers to abuse the email link. On a MediaWiki website, such as Wikiversity, the easiest method is to use the Special:EmailUser feature. For example, to include a link to the email of User:Example you would use the wiki link [[Special:EmailUser/Example]]. This assumes that User:Example has entered a valid email in Special:Preferences.
Another option is to use a tool such as Obfuscate Email Address on Web Page. If we enter the example email address example@foo.bar it returns code that can be inserted in any webpage, including a wiki. It looks like example@foo.bar in the webpage but if you click on edit this page you will see that the plain text of the email address is obfuscated using html markup and appears as
example@foo.bar
in the source code. Tbis is not guaranteed to work but could provide some measure of protection against address harvesting.
See the links below for a more detailed discussion of different methods to hide email addresses from spammers.