What is it with plus addressing!

I forewarn you this post will undoubtedly sound like a rant, that's because it is. Plus addressing a wonderful thing, if you don't know what it is then in a few words its the ability to add a plus then a word after your email alias and it still go to the same mail box. For example, mike+blog@mydomain.com is treated as mike@mydomain.com. Now what makes this interesting is that you can use the +bit to apply mailbox filtering, for instance I receive all the debug and error emails for the websites i have developed in the past and host. Now rather than them all point to mike@myemailaddress.com and have to filter manually I can simply add a + and a handler for each site, thus allowing easy mail management. Let's not stop there, you can have mike+junk@myemailaddress.com to give to those sites that you have to setup an account with just to view some article that you'll only ever use once and not have to worry about it. Wow amazing you may be thinking, but whats the catch... Some mail servers and in particular some websites don't support it. Even worse, some websites have badly coded javascript email address checkers that chuck a huge angry error message accusing you of trying to break their systems by providing an invalid email address, when of course you are providing a very legitimate one. This is where the problem lies, the Internet community as a whole are unwilling to sort out their code and mail servers to provide I feel an invaluable function which would make my, and I'm sure other peoples, lives easier. Tonight I was testing out some code I have been developing and decided to use plus addressing as i didn't really want to send loads of junk to my personal account just catch it and file it, however my CPanel based Linux Hosting doesn't handle this and kept bouncing the emails back as invalid mailboxes. I was very confused how it was an invalid host and decided to contact my hosting and email provider about the issue, to start off with they didn't even know what plus addressing was! I could tell that I was going to get a good answer and after a bit of time I established with the provider that the CPanel system running on the Linux servers didn't handle +'s. It treats +'s as another form of an @. So my mike+test@myemailaddress.com was being handled as mike@test@myemailaddress.com. At this point i was astounded, how can such a system exist and be deployed so globally and no one care about this. Further to say I was far from happy about this and seriously considered moving provider, but the effort level was too much. I then thought hey my Gmail accounts sat doing nothing lets try it on that. The good news is that Gmail does support plus addressing and I was able to test my code as I needed, but the fact remains why do people put up with so many sites and hosts not supporting plus addressing, if we all started bugging our hosting providers and email webmasters when their sites don't work properly things may change. Then again I wouldn't count on it. Now before I leave you with some useful links on plus addressing I should add that I did find a work around for my CPanel plus addressing issues, that was to turn on the catch all option on my domain, this however I decided was not a good idea so chose to leave it. Good Plus Addressing Resources: Anders Jacobsen's blog - http://www.jacobsen.no/anders/blog/archives/2002/08/24/email_addresses_with_a_are_valid.html What is Plus Addressing - http://www.pacificonline.com/SmarterTicket/Customer/KBArticle.aspx?articleid=157 Good Old Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_address#Plus_.28or_Minus.29_addressing A PHP Based Email Validator - http://derrick.pallas.us/email-validator/