> The reason they do this is because they want to suck into the max number
> of users. The important part is to get you into your account prior to
> confirmation so that you can start networking with your friends and
> start following people.
Sure. But. For something like twitter, there's no harm having an account whose email is unreachable, for twitter OR the user - unless the user screws up their username and pass and wants a reminder. The reason to associate the email with the account is for the social networking piece - to associate it with your online "identity." Twitter doesn't want me creating an account impersonating you[r email address], so they notify the email address I provide that an account was created. You would think "hey, I didn't sign up for that!"
Sure, this is inconvenient for the user who creates an account and immediately forgets their username/pass and didn't save it in their browser (really?). In that case, create a new twitter account - they're free! ;-)
On to the geeky part:
> Lack of experience is the cause of that glaring error. And the
> separation of software dev from network ops. The network ops folks are
> cursing the bounceback email, no doubt. But since the software devs
> never learn of their mistake, they never learn to be better devs in
> outfits like twitter that probably grew too fast for their own 'good'.
As a former UNIX/sendmail admin I will say the ONLY important thing is to have a valid envelope FROM field set so that when you eventually pass your form contents as an email to an SMTP server, the bounces have somewhere to go. Or else they end up in root's mailbox when the bounce bounces, where they are either forwarded to the dev's personal email via procmail script or directly to /dev/null depending on how BOFHy I felt.
Any validation is for the user's benefit ("hey user, user at glirk.bork is probably wrong!) because the user@ part can only be validated by the glirk.com email server. The dev can never ensure that the email address provided won't eventually bounce.
Matt
-- GnuPG Key ID: 0xC33BD882 aim/google/MSN/yahoo: beyondzero123