Why are email addresses blocked or mangled in Mumsnet private messages?

[prh47bridge]

People sometimes contact my via PMs for advice on school admission appeals. They occasionally want to send me documents to read. They can't do that via PM, so I give them an email address (not my normal one) to use. However, today my address has been mangled, so instead of showing a hotmail email address it shows outlook.live.com/mail/. This is clearly useless. I get why you would want to stop people exposing their email address publicly, but why block it on PMs?

Perhaps they want to keep all traffic and messaging via the site so it’s better for selling advertising? Although, it might just be a cock up knowing mumsnets IT 😂

Sounds like a cockup, perhaps caused by unwise application of ‘artificial intelligence’.

I don't know why this happens but I usually manage to get round it by typing out the email address - ie sanctymoanyarse at hotmail dot com

That's what I've done too. I'm just wondering why Mumsnet thinks they should make it difficult for us to share email addresses when we want to.

In the 90s, chatline operators used to listen to messages and delete ones where people using the service tried to exchange phone numbers in order to be able to speak off the service and avoid paying the 0898 operator.

This is what I do when writing my email address. Just space is out and it doesn’t happen.

It all started last year when they had to block PMs for a while due to dodgy links.