A Dumb Question

Everyone who wants an email reply to a thread couches his address as
follows: My initials plus my last name (commercial "at" sign) and a
period with that google thingy type email extension.

Is in only because I use Thunderbird as my news feed reader, because I
can see your email in the "From" block of the message header. I can
also simply click the "Reply" button vs. "Followup" if I want to reply
directly.

Or is it that because web crawlers harvesting email addresses only scan
the bodies of the messages and not the headers? Or am I one of the few
who has a spam blocker which blocks any email not from an allowed sender?

Inquiring minds want to know.
--
Dan, 5J