ButtUgly: Main_blogentry_071103

Emaily ranty

I've been using '+' -addresses to register to different places. You know, my email address here is "jalkanen+jspwiki@ecyrd.com". For random companies I am "jalkanen+randomcompany@ecyrd.com". This has a couple of advantages:

I can see if anyone has sold my contact information, even though they told me they wouldn't.
It is rather easy to filter the incoming messages.
It works transparently on most MTAs, no config required.
It confuses most spambots - I can just trash all messages to "jspwiki@ecyrd.com", because email harvesters in general do not understand the "+" -notation and just imagine that "jalkanen+jspwiki@ecyrd.com" is really "jspwiki@ecyrd.com" Yay!

However it does have some negative side effects as well. The most annoying are the moronic web masters and web page coders, who think it's really, really useful to check email addresses for typos. This wouldn't be so bad, except that they think that "+" is not a legal character in an email address. Well, guess what, it is. And now I can't renew my IEEE membership because the incredibly helpful system thinks I am a moron who cannot spell his email address...

Gah. These are exactly the kind of failures you don't want to see... I mean, I can stand my Mac crashing every now and then, I know how to prepare for those incidents. Cars break down sometimes, no worries.

But imagine a car which thinks that you cannot sit on the drivers seat because you are wearing the wrong pants? "Sorry, these pants are not compatible with the color of this car." Or an operating system which says that "your name cannot be Janne, since there is no such name in English language, and you have bought an UK operating system."

Ngh. Being annoyed and having a flu is not good for your health.