[eluser]michaelh99[/eluser]
The reason I encrypted the email address was not for fear of spamming. I never reveal email addresses to my users, if they message another user, all they see is the user name and the messages are sent by my server.
The reason I did it is that if the DB is ever compromised, the attackers will have a harder time correlating my users with other DB leaks. Many (most?) users use the same password on multiple systems and having the email address makes it that much easier for the crackers to start guessing passwords.
Of course, this assumes that the attacker didn't also gain access to the php source and hence the salt.
Where I went initially wrong is in using CI's encryption for the email. CI apparently rotates the key which means I can't do a simple result comparison when checking to see if an email address has already been used when a user is signing up.
Soon I'll be converting that to use an hash with salt which will take care of that issue.
