For it to be valid it has to be an email, and i'm not about to put everyone's email in there.

I haven't yet seen a site which would actually put people emails in there. The RSS 2.0 spec truly says it should be an email:
http://cyber.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html#ltauthorgtSubelementOfLtitemgt

So why not simply use:
<author>[email protected] (Actual Author Name)</author>
?

I'd like to see article author's names, I don't care about emails.

Also, the Atom spec is much more reasonable, only name is mandatory an email is optional:
https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/atom.html#person

Maybe you could switch your feed from RSS to Atom? (If it's not Atom already, I see this in the header:
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
)

I have changed it so it keeps our email, but uses everyone's username for the next code drop.

Edit: Done

Cool, thanks!

No problem at all :), happy to make it better!