[LINK] Why www.etc?

[Stilgherrian]

On 7/12/07 10:59 AM, "Paul Brooks" <pbrooks-link at layer10.com.au> wrote:

> Jan Whitaker wrote:
>> [in an email address] Even the
>> @ I believe can be substituted with +. I just learned that recently
>> when setting up a new email account, but that may not be universal.
>> 
>> Jan
> The '+' is a fairly recent development used only within the Cpanel
> webhosting system as far as I know.

This "+" is not part of the email address, but of the username to log into
the POP3 or IMAP email account in the cPanel/WHM web hosting environment.
The email address itself still MUST have the "@" separating the local part
(username) from the domain.

The confusion comes from fact that many people equate "email address" with
"mailbox" when they're completely independent things. And this is a
"reasonable confusion", if I can coin that term, because in many hosting
environments the username you use to log into your mailbox is the same as
the username part of the email address, or often the whole email address (to
cope with the fact that there might be bob at somedomain.com and
bob at someotherdomain.com hosted on the same mail server).

But they need not be the same -- and indeed in many environments the mailbox
logins are user IDs like a student number or an employee number, but there
might be any number of email addresses all dumping their received email into
that mailbox.

Some email clients can't cope with a username that has a "@" in it,
apparently, so cPanel maps a username with a "+" in that spot as well.

HTH,

Stil


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