Signing Up for Microsoft's TechNet Forum

Trying to help a poor soul on the Microsoft forum, I decided I would create an account so I could do just that. I was presented the following screen:

Note the advice beneath "Display E-Mail" field. Microsoft is essentially saying that you shouldn't actually put your e-mail address there at all and offers a rather silly ways of preventing spam which I believe even a simple e-mail harvester would figure out (since the open bracket is a token which would end an e-mail address). It reads:

This will be visible to all forum members. If you enter your real e-mail address, you will likely receive unwanted messages (spam) because spammers regularly gather e-mail addresses from public communties. We highly recommend that you use a modified version of your e-mail address. For example, if an e-mail address were someone@example.com, we would recommend modifying it to someone@example.com.(donotspam).

How does Google solve this problem? Google parses every posting and obfuscates the e-mail address with the first few characters followed by some ellipses. To retrieve the full e-mail address, I would need to click the link, fill in a CAPCHA form and only then would I be able to see the full e-mail address. This seems like a very reasonable process, especially compared with Microsoft's "please don't actually put an e-mail address into the form" recommendation. To date, AFAIK, I have not received any spam to my GMail account from something I posted on Google Groups. (Actually, I don't think I ever received a single spam e-mail to my GMail account ever).

For those who wish to use a real e-mail address for the MSDN forums and who use GMail, you can try using a custom e-mail address with rules. It's a very simple and elegant solution which I am about to use.