Noticed this a while ago, and see this has now been addressed at Protection_From_Harvesters section Talk:Protection_From_Harvesters but needs to be corrected here as well.

The email address is encoded to protect from harvesting by spam bots...

This tag parses the email in plain text in the source. Echo

This is another of those it worked that way in 1.2! issues. The email address originally passed through the internal WP function antispambot() before echoing, but the demand to filter near every bit of blog data (for API hooks and whatnot) required that get pulled. I'll note here (and on the PfromH page linked above) how to make use of the antispambot() function to obfuscate the author email addy. -Kaf 07:18, 31 May 2005 (UTC)

The email address is partially hidden and made more difficult for spam bots to harvest. It will display correctly in all browsers.

Perhaps you should explain how it does that? I'm not experiencing any kind of obfuscation when I use the_author_email. From what I can tell in 1.5.1.3, it prints the e-mail address in plain text without ANY kind of protection. -kccricket 14:07, 30 Jul 2005 (UTC)

See my comment above from May. I had edited the description to state the_author_email() does NOT encode the address, but it somehow got reverted back. I've (again) corrected it. Hopefully for the last time... -Kaf 21:13, 30 Jul 2005 (UTC)