Are there spam concerns when using the address tag?

Question

I know that spam bots scour web sites and harvest emails, however I wasn't sure about the extent of information that they search for (for instance, names, physical addresses, phone numbers, etc.)

In essence, my question boils down to:

"Do spam bots search web pages for physical addresses, and I am helping them through the use of the <address> HTML tag?"

EDIT: I should have been more specific with my question. If I use proper techniques to obfuscate the sensitive information so they wouldn't detect it otherwise, would enclosing that content inside the address tag be like offering it up to spam bots on a silver platter?

Answer 1

Spam bots will search for anything that looks like the information that they want to find, and not just information that is tagged up properly. Avoiding a specific tag will not make any difference, spammers don't play by any rules.

Answer 2

It depends entirely on how the bot is programmed to recognize addresses. Some probably pull anything in an <address> tag and assume that it's an address. Others might ignore the html tags entirely. The big ones probably use a combination of techniques, including showing suspected addresses to humans and having them help it recognize the actual address therein.

I'd just assume that any information you post publicly on the Internet can be gathered either by bots or by humans and put to ill use. If you don't want the information to be public, protect it with passwords, encryption, and such.