And I upvoted your post for completely valid criticism.

Keeping that in mind, these aren't the spammers you're looking for, move along. I suppose I could justify the post by saying any one of the following:

• I was trying to help him learn Perl better by pointing him to some relevant modules.
• He could have been very inarticulate and failed to mention a legitimate goal he was trying to accomplish.
• The information in the post may be of use to someone with a legitimate goal. Spidering an intranet to retrieve statistics about the availability of contact information perhaps.
• A couple hundred spams is nothing compared to the major offenders. Even if the post directly causes these couple hundred spams, by helping out people with legitimate goals it more than balances out.

I'm sure I could think up many more, but to be honest, they're not very good reasons. My point was that responses like •Re: Re: how do I extract contact data from websites? do nothing to help the situation and only push this site closer to Slashdot-like discussion levels (which is a bad thing). So write filters, lobby your government, write secure software to reduce the number of open relays, but don't waste time with posts like that.