Why doesn the spam bot just convert my email address back into the displayed format and copy that?
An extremely small amount actually do. The reason that most don’t is that almost no one tries to mask and hide their email addresses from spam bots in any way. Also, those who are smart enough to mask their email address from spam bots don’t use the same email address masking method. Even more, they tend to be smart enough not to click on spam. As a result, a bot, and specifically the person who wrote the bot’s code, who even tried to find email addresses hidden in some specific format would not find very many. Since their goal is quantity, they usually do not search for email addresses munged this way.
