I guessed that giving an email address when registering would lead directly to spam, but decided to risk it anyway.

That's a cool trick to see where your spam is coming from. Please update us on how much you get.

Is there a non-spamming reason for requiring an email? This is the first board I've seen to require an email address to register, though my sample size is admittedly low.

Most sites will tell you what the consequences of giving them your email are.

I never thought the spam came directly from 43Folders or that the sender got it from Merlin. I'd be shocked if that's how he rolled. What I think happened is they grabbed it from my profile (I had it set to be shown).

It has worked out pretty well so far. If you have a Gmail account you can do something similiar. Say your email was something@gmail.com. If you use a '+' in your address, anything after the '+' will be ignored. So if I registered for this site I would enter something+43folders@gmail.com. Gmail ignores the '+43folders' and deliveres the mail to me but you can still see 'something+43folders@gmail.com' in the to: field. Using that info you can determine where it came from.

I don't think I've seen any other spam to that address, though I haven't looked at every piece in the spam folder.

Really? Most every site I've joined requires one. Some use the address as a login, most require that you respond to a confirmation email so they know the person setting it up is actually a person and not something automated.

I have no problem giving out my email, I just would have a problem if a site said they would never give out my address and they did. (again, I don't think that happened here)