Steven Zahm@ Jim
re: I’d like to display the first name and last name in place of the email address. (to help reduce spam)
Using text instead of displaying the email address does not have any effect on email harvesting bots. They can simply parse the mailto attribute which also stores the email address but is not visible to the user.
If you really want to protect the email addresses, you need the ROT13 Email Encryption extension. This is also something that can be done with third party plugins as you mention, but they may or may not work on the email addresses displayed by Connections. It really depends on their implementation. The methods used by the ROT13 Email Encryption extension leaves the email address prefectly user readable and accessible while preventing bots from easily scaping them.
Alternatively, there is the Contact extension. The emails address are not displayed at all and is replaced by a contact form accessible from the entry’s profile/details page.
Another option is to make email addresses private, that way only users logged on to your site can view email addresses.
Hope that helps!