> I’ve started sending short emails back and only if I don’t get a pitch back do I actually engage but I dislike feeling distrustful, treating people as guilty until proven innocent.

> but I can’t bring myself to take my email address down

A couple of things:

1: Use a different email address specifically for Hacker News. This is trivial if you own your own domain. (For example, I have a separate email address for my website.)

2: Set up an autoresponder with a short message, something like:

"I used to enjoy getting emails from the Hacker News community; I still do! But, due to the unreasonable number of product pitches, please:

1: Confirm that you're a real person, and that you wrote the words you sent to me.

2: Confirm that you're not trying to sell me something."

Then only engage based on the response.

> I know there is nothing HN can do about this, it’s not their fault

In today's world, there's a few ways HN could mitigate this, if they chose to. The simplest is to put email addresses (or the profile page itself) behind AI / scraping detection. (And I admit it's frustrating to have to ask for this.) They could also only show emails to logged in users with some karma.

The more complicated is for HN to proxy emails in a way similar to Craigslist. (And this would be going above and beyond the call of duty.) Users would need to be logged in, and have some karma, to send email; AND users who abuse it, (IE, send more than X cold emails over a period of Y hours) would be throttled.