Yep, seems like an easy thing to bypass. Might be better to search for these keywords within tweets or fb updates and create a script based on that (re-scrape every x users so that it changes).
Please, please, please check your email validation... Disallowing + notation doesn't make sense, and I for one won't sign up for a service that doesn't allow it. http://i.imgur.com/xfVDKyL.png
The local part may consist of alphabetic and numeric characters, and the following characters: !, #, $, %, &, ', *, +, -, /, =, ?, ^, _, `, {, |, } and ~, possibly with dot separators (.), inside, but not at the start, end or next to another dot separator (RFC2822 3.2.4).
This is a good post. I had similar credentials coming out of school last year (but I did graduate with a CIS degree). I have a strong (maybe stronger than CS) background in finance, but I love programming. I was hired in less than a month as a PHP Dev (I have ~ 3 years PHP experience), making a decent living. Most of my interviewers seemed to be looking for a strong grasp of the fundamentals (particular languages didn't really matter as much as understanding OOP concepts and SDLC stuff), as well as a desire to learn and get better. I completed a lot of programming logic tests - mainly a bunch of pseudocode - during my interviews, which I assume tell a lot more about the quality (or potential) of a programmer than writing an actual program.
I can't be sure that any of this is true... It's just what I took away from a recent, similar situation.
The #1 thing that has helped me to keep emails organized is taking advantage of the + notation that gmail allows... Every store or website I give my email address to, I simply append (emailaddress+storename@gmail.com) to my email address, which allows for easy filtering later. It also shows me who has been giving out my email address :)
On a similar note, gmail allows you so put dots in your email address, so when I give my email address out to humans, I use first.last@gmail.com, and when I give it to computers, I use firstlast@gmail.com
I find that this easily filters out machine generated addresses, always works on forms, and if spambots ever get wise to it, it'd be difficult for them to add in the dot at the correct place, whereas taking out the stuff after the plus would be quite easy
Very, very annoying... This is what a friend of mine always sends to those who choose to filter valid characters from email addresses... https://gist.github.com/EHLOVader/4531693
I don't use gmail, but used to use <prefix><dash>username (prefix-username@) with qmail - and at some point had to have email at a site that used Exim with standard setup - that allowed <prefix><plus>username (prefix+user@) -- but not with a dash (it is possible to configure Exim to do this - but with qmail it is standard).
That's how I discovered that a lot of sites erroneously filter out + from the username part.
Now host my own email with Exim - but rather than use a prefix, I've just set up Exim to route all users at all subdomains to my inbox, so I can use adresses like:
site@s.example.com (s for spam). So far I that have worked fine.
A worse system (read: hack) is to put variable amounts of dots in your email address when you sign up for something, because Gmail strips dots from your account name when delivering your mail. It requires you to remember or write down who got what amount of dots though.
For most, I use sneak+tag@mydomain (Google Apps), but for those, they all get bucketed into my special noncompliant@mydomain email to guard against the eventuality of one of them selling me out.
I do something similar with `storename@mydomain.com`, which all get filtered to the same `me@mydomain.com` which is imported into my gmail.
I get very strange looks whenever I give out my email address in person. But you're right; it's an excellent way to track who gives out my email and it's an easy way to block spam that gets through the filter.
Lol @ the comments about it being the wrong use of css... That's obviously not the point. I love creating css art... because I can, and it's fun.