Everyone hates spam.
Ask someone for their cell phone number and they immediately think you will send them spam text messages.
Ask someone for their email address and they immediately think you will waste their time and send spam emails.
The internet gets clogged with spam emails every day. We directly track and block about 75% of email traffic every day because it's all spam.
Google has a dedicated department to fight "Web Spam" and all things that cause any type of digital interaction that will annoy people. This team helps to control the built in filters that block troublesome websites.
One of the things they watch out for are websites that plainly show email addresses. Freely posting your email address as bob@jewelrystore.com will invite spam. Malicious email companies scour the internet looking for freely posted email addresses and submit them to alleged "opt-in" email lists. We've directly experienced email spam within weeks of letting an email address publicly "out in the wild" on website.
Google indicated in one of their videos that public email addresses is one of their minor signals to downgrading a website. Most of the time, we talk about things that will improve your SEO ranking, but in this case, showing your email address as clear text will lower your SEO.
Do you want to allow people to contact you via email? The solution is an online form with some type of CAPTCHA that prevents hacking and also allows real people to email you. Naturally, you can reply directly to them, but the initial contact is through your website form rather than using an email program.
Bottom line: Don't show your email address as clear text on any website, especially your own. If you really want to show your email address without a form, then you should create an image with your email address as a graphic in it. Far fewer email address programs can find those images.
