We're very unlikely to ever use your e-mail. It is a good idea to have it set to something that works in case you forget your password, though. This is part of why an e-mail is required to sign up.

We are so unlikely to use your e-mail that we didn't even e-mail people when we deleted the last batch of inactive accounts (who had never posted a node and hadn't visited in a very long time, if ever -- most of which were the result of people entering an invalid e-mail when they signed up anyway).

I'm pretty sure that we have never sent a batch of e-mails out. On very rare occasions I think we've sent e-mail to a particular user because of some very unusual circumstances. But I can't remember any examples because it happens so rarely (I can recall a few times we considered e-mailing someone, but I don't think we ended up doing so those times).

And we make a decent amount of beer money selling your e-mail to pr0n sites. No, wait, that was that other site I worked on.

Feel free to set up a temporary address in order to sign up. It is a pain and I promise you that there is little point to making that effort. Another reason for the e-mail requirement is to make it a bit more difficult to build yourself a clone army.

We don't require an e-mail address out of any desire to send you e-mail.