john romero comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action .sig from 6/2/94
the actual message included the unsavory phrase "kneel and drink my knob", trash talk re: https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Eric_Yick_Leung
@revenant i'd think that an anti-spam bot measure but i don't recall if that was a problem yet. people freely shared their emails on usenet in the early '90s but that probably stopped later.
@revenant ah, interesting. so they're unrecoverable?
@alyx i'm not sure. google probably stores the unedited posts
@alyx actually yeah they're available in full if you click the address and then do the "i'm not a robot" thing
@alyx iirc it's a thing google groups does, even for old posts where most of the addresses no longer exist