Back in the olden days, when I enjoyed things like running my own mail server, I used qmail's virtual domain support and .qmail files to create a unique email address for every website that asked for an email. This was handy for figuring out who let me address get into the hands of spammers, or just blocking sites that didn't unsubscribe me. I created these in the format sitename@plek.org. It worked out pretty well.
I'll get to my real point here in a second, so please stick with me. I've since outgrown any desire to run my own mail server. It's a pain, especially with the never ending fight to keep spam filters trained and updated. Thankfully Google stepped in an created a very usable solution in Google Apps. Some time ago I switched plek.org email over there (and this blog to blogger) and things work well. Since moving to Google Apps, I have a slightly different way to handle things. I don't want to make my primary address a catchall for @plek.org since the spam volume is way too intense. I ran that way for a while and I didn't enjoy the hundreds of spams per day, even though Googles filters work quite well, if there is ever a false positive, it's gone for ever in the sea of trash.
Thankfully Google has a nice solution. myaddress+sitename@plek.org works really well. If my address were spammy@plek.org, I could just tell Bebo to send all their mail to spammy+bebo@plek.org and all is good.
Here's the rub. Someone at Facebook, and someone at Hi5 decided they really needed to be extra serious about email address validation. Those handy myaddress+sitename@plek.org fail the validation. They don't accept them at all. Bebo does, MySpace does. iLike does (if we didn't I'd complain and make sure we fixed it). Facebook and Hi5 really need to fix this. It's stupid to even try validating email addresses like that. The only thing that really works is to send a mail to the user.
