Sunday, July 22, 2007

The "plus" sign is a valid e-mail address character

I really need to go to bed, but I thought I would rant for a quick bit.

If you design a web page that asks for an e-mail address is some manner, you really better $%@& well known the accepted standards for e-mail or rather the "internet message format".

I get so pissed off when a web form won't allow me to enter a plus sign in my e-mail address. This is a valid and useful option. You see, everything after the + to the @ sign is presented but ignored for delivery. So, bill@vinsonweb.com and bill+spammingbastards@vinsonweb.com go to the same address, but I can at least see the address it was sent to. Now, when I give my e-mail address to any old company, I can see if I start getting spam on that e-mail account, I know who to blame.

There is no incentive for companies to fix this as it is used by a small group of people. Well, no reason except for the page designer sleeping soundly with the knowledge that he did his work right and isn't completely inept.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow, I didn't know that. That's a useful fact. Thanks!

Tanner Lovelace said...

That's one of my pet peeves. Almost no one accepts plus signs in e-mail addresses. I used to use qmail, though, and it uses the dash "-" as the delimiter, so I used that for a while until I moved to Google Hosted email. Unfortunately, I just found one place that doesn't allow dashes in their e-mail addresses either! Gah!