A personally beneficial result of the recent (and misguided) public handwringing over the way Gmail handles dots is my discovery that it also ignores everything after a '+' in the local part of your address. There are two useful applications of this feature:
This isn't exactly a original thought, which is demonstrated by the availability of numerous disposable email address services.
The bad news: a lot of web apps -- most? -- reject or mishandle e-mail addresses that contain a plus sign. Cingular rejects them. Bank of America's site rejects them. Flickr gets it right.
The worst offender is Ebay, which silently stripped the plus sign from my address and sent the change-of-email confirmation off to some non-existent inbox.
If one were the type to reference standards documents, one might point to RFC 2822. If one were so inclined.
Throughout 2003 and early 2004 I spent a lot of time on the AT&T Wireless (now Cingular) customer forums. I was fairly active, according to my user profile, authoring 96 posts (and reading 3846 others), tallying 6289 page views, and logging 4406 minutes at the site.
But that's hard to tell today, because (I've just discovered) 72 of those 96 posts are missing -- deleted, I presume, by forum administrators.
The reason I suspect that the posts were deleted (and not simply lost due to technical error or incompetence) is that I originally stopped using the site in response to the removal of one of my posts. I had been searching for something I'd posted a few days earlier (back in 2004) and couldn't find the post, so I mailed customer service. Here's the relevant portion of their response:
Sorry that your post was removed. Unfortunately there were some inappropriate responses on it and they were in a manner in which we had no choice but to move the entire thread.
They hadn't removed my post, in other words, because of anything I'd said, but because they felt some of the replies were inappropriate. In response, they nuked the entire thread without contacting me and without any explanation at the place the thread had been. I thought that was pretty silly. I stopped using the site.
Which brings us to today. This DMCA-related post reminded me that we'd had some pretty interesting discussions about the DMCA (as it relates to wireless phones) on the customer forums back in 2003. I immediately found this post in which I'd assured a fellow customer that it wasn't illegal to unlock his phone. In that post, I linked to another post, in which, if memory serves, I became less and less convinced of my original assertion and an interesting discussion of the DMCA went on. That second, more interesting thread is now missing. I remember posting to other DMCA-related threads, too, but a current search for "dmca" at Cingular's site returns zero results.
Cingular has the right to remove posts (and they say as much in their posting guidelines). That much is obvious. And it's fair to say that a number of my posts were critical of the company's behavior. But Cingular also says that it "does not generally edit or monitor content posted by participants in its Customer Support Forums." That lacks truthiness.
So the result is that a lot of stuff that I (and others, I'm sure) said on those forums is now missing, which creates an inaccurate public record of the discussions that took place. My frustration is exacerbated by the frequency with which users refer to other threads that are now gone. No message exists explaining that a post has been removed. They're all 404, baby.
And I'm still a Cingular customer. In a contract. Yay!