[Leica] OT: Protecting my email from spammers

[boulanger.croissant at gmail.com (Peter Klein)]

Given all the spam I've been getting on my old personal address, I want 
to protect my new personal address from bots and Web crawlers. My new 
Web host does offer spam filtering, which I've enabled. Here are a 
couple of question for those of you who are pros or talented amateurs at 
this sort of thing.  Feel free to tell me I'm being overly paranoid or 
overdoing it if I am.

1.  To what lengths do the crawlers and bots go to find addresses to 
spam?  Do they only look for clear text? Are they fooled by 
constructions such as "nospam at getlost dot org" or "nospam [at] 
getlost [dot] org" or similar?  Do ordinary people who are not computer 
experts know how to deal with such addresses?

2. What if, instead of a mailto link, I put a link to one of these two 
pictures on my Web site:
<http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/pklein/temp/spohrborg.jpg.html>
<http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/pklein/temp/spohrborgDiag.jpg.html>
Are the bad guys using OCR technology to pull addresses out of 
pictures?  If so, might the second of the two pictures be more likely to 
fool them?  And again, would they be less likely to be understood by 
ordinary people?

3. I set up an "out of office" autoreply on my old address describing 
the situation, but not telling recipients the new address, because that 
(I assume) would also inform all the spammers.  I've emailed my new 
address to people I know.  Sometimes that isn't enough.  Suppose I were 
to put a link to one of the above pictures in the autoreply?  Or linked 
to my initial page on the gallery, with text instructions to go to the 
temp folder, go to page 3 and open the last picture?  Would that expose 
me to further danger?  Or are the bots not programmed to deal with 
things like that?

Thanks for any help!

--Peter