Does e-mail obfuscation really make automatic harvesting harder?

Question

Many users and forum programs in attempt to make automatic e-mail address harversting harder conseal them via obfuscation - @ is replaced with \"at\" and . is replaced with

Answer 1

It will be difficult for the spammers as well as your users to identify the email address.

A nice article from wikipedia on Email obfuscation or address munging

One common way of hiding email from bots and spammers is to create an image containing the email address. Facebook does this, for instance. Now, using images for email is inherently bad for accessibility, because text readers will not be able to read it. But even otherwise, there are several free character recognition programs that do a pretty good of decoding such email-images.

From here