If your web browser can process code to give you an email account, email "bots" certainly can as well. The only thing that is remotely effective is the .jpg obvuscation and that's generally just annoying for website visitors to use.
Just get a good spam filter and be done with it.
Plus, some serious spammers pay folks in foreign countries (read India) to actually scan websites and manually add email addresses to their spam lists.
Last year I installed a firewall at a friend's home business. He had a simple DSL modem before, and had configured his mail server to forward all mail to his gmail account. The firewall is a Sun server with dual network interfaces and a lot of IP filtering, and a proper email server.
When it was turned on but before any filtering was enabled I monitored his net traffic and I was amazed. And I do this for a living. His DSL bandwidth was saturated with email traffic coming and going. He had little bandwidth left for his business which is streaming audio.
Because he had forwarded all mail to gmail, spammers quickly learned that his site accepts anything from anyone - not unlike an open relay. I'm certain he was on every spammer's list there is, and they were beating his bandwidth to death.
I configured the new mail server to accept mail only to legitimate addresses at his site which is fewer than 10, and to reject the rest. Then he got a real-time antivirus scanner that scans incoming mail and rejects it if there is a positive hit. Then I added greet pause, real-time DNS blacklists, and content scanning that looks for blacklisted URLs, common and uncommon spam content (Nigeria scams, etc). Then I added connection rate throttling, bad address throttling, quality of service throttling.
I also added several geographic areas from around the world to his IP filter so that his site is invisible to them, and of course blocked all unneeded ports.
By the time I was done his wasted bandwidth fell to a tiny fraction of what it was, and delivered spam fell from thousands per hour to a dozen per week.
Then I turned up a proxy for his web server which is now nat'd behind the firewall, as are all his servers. So he could still gain access remotely for ftp, windows shares, Mac shares, and web content, I configured a VPN interface that allows him to make a secure connection from anywhere. He has remote access to his desktops, web server, etc. over ssl.
He paid $300 for everything, but I gave away quite a bit because he's a friend.
So the way this all started was he had his email address in plain text on his various web pages. It is far better to create a small jpg image that shows the text of your email address, and it is easily done. Better is to not include an email address but that's not always possible. And a strategic thing to do is to add several bogus email addresses in html comments on the pages, and any mail they receive can be used to populate your anti-spam filters. These are called spam traps. Any mail to a spam trap can be used by automation to block the sending IP.
