Peacebringers

Something has been severely getting on my nerves lately, and it has hit the point where I just need to rant, and MAYBE someone out there agrees with me. Many websites, mainly the websites with good web programmers, check for incorrectly formatted, fake email addresses, and do so incorrectly. Addresses like PR4tcHE{T,teRry-NO}^T@spam-me.com, are not legit… though emaillist-manager+subscribe@somemail.com is totally legitimate. Another example: jaraeth+pbspam@gmail.com, is totally legitimate, yet so many providers DENY me to sign up for service using such an email address. Why would I? I use it to detect spam.

I use jaraeth+websitename@gmail.com so when I get spam, I can tell… “this spammer got my email address from ‘websitename’. DIAFCA!!” There’s another issue too. When I am allowed to sign up for service with such an email address, but when I’m using a piece of mail software or an email provider that receives the usual email verification, and that address contains “website-listname-verification+serial3517924806@listdomain.com”, and denies it. Some systems, such as the older majordomo mailing list software was known to use a similar format for subscription, unsubscribe, and moderation commands as it was often controlled using direct email commands from the email list owner and subscribers.

Rather than rant on forever, all I can ask is that website developers and spam checkers ought to know their RFC’s… know what is legitimate, what is fake, how to check for fraudulent email & addresses, and stop blocking email that contains legitimate characters. As we say in my IT group: “Learn 2 mail noob”. I feel that I can say with only invoking minimal flame wars, that if more mail providers and website verification scripts checked for the actual semantics of the email address per the RFC’s, and checked for valid MX-hosts, that would be half the battle. I’d even settle for allowing email addresses that contained the local part (before the @) to have one period (1 .) any number of hyphens and underscores, and that any of these was not found as either the first or last character of the local part.

That’s just me though. A really good reference for email RFC’s and a general all around reference for info on email addresses can be found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_address