Many years ago a substantially sized OSS groups' forum software (maybe KDE or Qt? it was a long time ago) was accidentally including user email addresses in the non-user-visible html tags of forum pages.

Web scanners though aren't people, and easily noticed them, thus building up a database of email addresses to spam people.

It was discovered when a friend mentioned that one of their uniquely generated email addresses was being used by spammers. Similar to this post.

So, we got in contact with the forum people to let them know, and they tracked down + fixed the problem.

Perhaps a similar thing is happening to the article author, rather than purposely malicious behaviour?