Pants Full of Unix

I've been using it for a while now, and I can't stress enough how totally awesome Spamgourmet is.

Here's the deal. You make an account with them. For free. Then you starting using

<some_random_string>.<integer>.<username>@spamgourmet.com

as your email address in all those stupid web forms. After <integer> messages forwarded to whatever email address you've specified… all further messages are dropped outright. Poof, spam gone.

I've used this in the past for things where I knew I didn't want more than the one email from them (movietickets.com, for instance). I don't typically use it the way I did today… but mycheckfree.com has a too smart by half email address format checker that nixes my typical workaround for places I expect to want email from repeatedly, but want to track to whom they've sold their email address so that I know when I get to sue them for violating their privacy policy: it refused to accept <username>+mycheckfree@my.dom[1] (yes, of course I did use a real domain, and yes, the mail would have come through just fine). So, screw it, I'll use spamgourmet, keep track of how many messages have gone through that address, and go change which address they use when it runs out.

[1] They're very obviously wrong here; + is a totally valid character for inclusion in the left-hand-side of an email address. Expanded from the syntax sections in RFC 822 (old, but it is still what we go by out here on the really real Internet), here's the set of rules that define precisely what is an email address:

addr-spec      =  local-part "@" domain
local-part     =  word *("." word)
domain         =  sub-domain *("." sub-domain)
sub-domain     =  domain-ref / domain-literal
domain-ref     =  atom
word           =  atom / quoted-string
atom           =  1*<any CHAR except specials, SPACE and CTLs>
quoted-string  =  <"> *(qtext/quoted-pair) <"> ; Regular qtext or
                                               ;   quoted chars.
domain-literal =  "[" *(dtext / quoted-pair) "]"
dtext          =  <any CHAR excluding "[",     ; => may be folded
                     "]", "\" & CR, & including
                     linear-white-space>
quoted-pair    =  "\" CHAR                     ; may quote any char
                                               ; (  Octal, Decimal.)
CHAR           =  <any ASCII character>        ; (  0-177,  0.-127.)
specials       =  "(" / ")" / "< " / ">" / "@"  ; Must be in quoted-
               /  "," / ";" / ":" / "\" / <">  ;  string, to use
               /  "." / "[" / "]"              ;  within a word.

The important point (right now, for me) is that local-part consists of word, consists of atom, includes + as a valid chartacter (it's octal 053 and decimal 43., for what it's worth), and there's really no reason except for laziness in doing a strict alpha-numeric match (why? to avoid control characters that would result in a buffer overflow or something?) on the webmaster's part.

Oh, and Bell Satanic^W^WVerizon is just as broken in just the same way. Stupidity like this really pisses me off.