Sorry, but in the spirit of the season, can I just say:

Ewwwwwwwwww!!!

Hyphens work. They are allowed. Period. (Sorry, I mean: hyphen!)  $WORK 
has hundreds of thousands of mailing lists (internal and external) with 
hyphens in the name. They work.

Now - do all web site programmers get it? Maybe not. That's no reason to 
exclude hyphens. If the web programmers stopped allowing the letter 'M', 
would you program around that? :-)

Pluses - welllll, maybe not. Periods and underscores are also perfectly 
normal in email addresses, and are the two most common delimiters for 
firstname/lastname.

With sendmail, you can rewrite *ANYTHING*. That doesn't mean that you 
*should*. I can't think of a reason why you couldn't do Option 2.

I do this more manually  by just adding the appropriate entries to 
/etc/aliases as I use them. This has the advantage that there is no 
'global pattern' of forwards, so 'abcd-arbitrarystring' does not go to 
abcd, and I do not accept mail from just any abcd-* address. I have 
considered doing this, though - with the opportunity to exclude any 
'naughty' senders - but haven't found that it has caused me enough 
trouble to do this.

Amazingly enough, the only address that I've given to commercial 
entities that I've really trouble with was the one that I gave to 
Borders Books. That one gets *LOTS* of spam, and I started receiving it 
about a month after I gave Borders a particular address. I don't know if 
they gave out the magic address, or if it was just a coincidence, but I 
get almost no spam from the addresses that I give out to other vendors - 
except from the vendors themselves, which is what I expect.

- Richard


Edward Ned Harvey wrote:
>
> > I have used qmail-style hyphen addressing such as tr
>
> > [email protected] for many years and have *never* had it rejected by
>
> > a form on a website. Not once. I now always run postfix configured for
>
> > hyphen addressing. I think it is more commonly accepted than plus.
>
>  
>
> Do you know if it would be easy to configure (or where to start 
> thinking about it) one of the aforementioned mailers to accept mail 
> for a given domain, and then modify and forward it?  That is ... 
>
>  
>
> Option 1:
>
> ·         Accept mail for a plus-addressed (or hyphen or whatever) 
> account, such as [email protected], strip out the part 
> after the plus or hyphen, and perhaps stick a new header in there 
> “Header was:” or something like that?
>
> ·         And then redirect the mail to [email protected] or 
> whatever address you like ... and probably have to find a way to 
> override the DNS lookup for MX at this point too ...  smart relay?
>
>  
>
> Option 2:
>
> ·         Accept mail for a catchall domain,  
> [email protected], strip out the part before the @, 
> store that info in a new header, and then redirect, as in Option 1
>
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