Except you can't use it for any legitimate purpose, as this would violate the CAN-SPAM Act.

Sorry, but nothing about this is shocking. There are a million easy ways to mine good lists, but as achille pointed out, they are basically worthless.

... and have ~28,000 ignore any email you send.

Email addresses of technically-savvy people are nearly worthless unless you have something they desperately need. Any person to email me without a prior relationship or mutual connection goes straight to my "never do business with" list, if they manage to pass my spam filters. I imagine most developers are similar.

I don't see the big deal about this. Visible emails on web pages are no different than a phone book. People get too worked up about this.

Post would be better if you left the code up there. I've been meaning to play around with nokogiri as well.