Time for another update on the OpenReach ‘Uber Complex Chief Engineer’ fail. I have now worked out why I am not getting emails from them: their email system is not compliant with email addressing standard, as set out by RFC 5332!

Let’s pause, and reflect on this: OpenReach, the backbone of UK’s Internet, is incapable of operating an email system that would be standard compliant.

Most specifically, their system is incapable of handling email addresses that contain the ‘+’ symbol. This symbol is commonly used to indicate a mailbox, a bit like an extension on a company phone number: if your email is hamish@example.com, then you can have multiple mailboxes, e.g., hamish+box1@example.com, hamish+something-else@example.com, etc., and all of these will just work and go to the base hamish@example.com address (this functionality is supported even by Google).

This effectively gives you an endless number of distinct addresses, and is rather useful for identifying who is selling your data to the spammers, as well as for filtering. Of course, nowadays many email providers, such as Proton, offer email aliases for this, and this is a better option than the mailboxes, but back when I signed up with my current ISP that wasn’t an option, and so I used a mailbox address, as back then I did as a matter of course.

Unfortunately, this lack of conformance with the email standard is not entirely unusual, and there are a great many websites out there that do email ‘validation’ implemented by some moron who could not be arsed to consult the publicly available standard, and so reject an email with the ‘+’ symbol (and others) in it. This is irritating, but survivable.

Unfortunately, there is another variation on this nonconformance : there are systems out there that instead of rejecting such an email at the point of entry, will ‘sanitise’ it by stripping away the characters they don’t like before storing it. This is outright anal, because if hamish@example.com is a valid address that receives email, hamish+box1@example.com is also a valid email that will receive messages, whereas hamishbox1@example.com is a different address altogether, and probably (hopefully!) not a valid one.

To make things worse, not only is OpenReach operating an email system that is not standard conformant, but it doesn’t detect the send failures either, and to add insult to an injury, the text messages they send out in parallel are from a number that does not accept replies. The net effect of this was me getting text reminders to sign some paperwork emailed to me, but not having any way to let them know I have never received any emails from them with the paperwork in the first place!

In the end, after a week of there and fro with my ISP, OpenReach have managed to send the email to them, and they then forwarded it to me, and so they are now authorised to burry a duct under our lawn!

They were also asked to change the email on their records for one without ‘+’, but I am pretty sure they did not do that, so I am really hoping no more emailing will be involved prior to breaking ground …