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Comment by Exuma | Hacker News Reader

So is that mail.jobs@ or mail+jobs@... or jobs@

A total flop on the last line

I bet if he can do this trace route thing, he can get all those emails going to his own domain regardless of who they are addressed to

I would presume a better way would be to not make people feel unsure of what it is, and just pick something thats super clear.

Or it's a filter. No need to send anything if you are unsure.

I didn't realize that arbitrary interpretation of vague text was a criteria for a great employer

Not really. From the lines above one can deduce that the dot represents space or colon, for obvious technical reasons. As such, I'd interpret

  mail.jobs.at.poinsignon.org

  mail: jobs@poinsignon.org

Yes really, you can see even in the other replies the interpretations are not 100% clear.

It took me a minute to realize it wasnt some form of "mail+jobs" or "mail.jobs". It wasnt until I wrote the last line of my comment that it was "mail jobs@"

I still think it's mail.jobs@ - so I'd hope the engineer set up collection on both addresses.

It'd probably be a lot safer to just have the line be "jobs.at.[...]"

Edited to add: Oh also - from the same line you can infer that a dot means a dot - the ".org" at the end confuses the meaning. Perhaps it'd be clearer if they went 100% slashdot and had ".DOT.org"

My interpretation was mail: jobs@poinsignon.org

My interpretation would be mail+jobs@example.com, given that it's become the de facto standard, and mail@example.com looks like his main one.

I'm not sure it can be a de facto standard with the number of sites that flatly refuse to recognize + as a valid character in email addresses. There's so many that I gave up and started just using . instead.

Really, you're arguing about the email in a traceroute CV being somewhat ambiguous? Having to traceroute the thing is going to be a much bigger filter. And it's quite clear if you just read it out as spoken text and then try to get the address from that. Really, anyone actually interested in contacting the guy will manage just fine.

An extremely mediochre attitude. You must simply believe that things shouldn't be the best they can be, but rather things that are easily fixable for clarity should just be accepted. Typical garbage in garbage out.

You can see there is more than a few replies of people who are confused about the email.

"Ah yes, here is a thing thats a big filter, so let me make the email yet another filter but instead of just (EASILY) fixing it I will just use that as an excuse to leave it"

How about... (huge surprise here......... wait for it)....... one just makes it better, such as:

jobs.AT.domain.DOT.com

I quite honestly cannot even understand the mental processes some people here go through. It's so clear, yet you're also not the first arguing for a retarded justification instead of just "fix it by making it less ambiguous" which is the ONLY correct answer. That is... unless you don't care about getting emails to your resume.

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