A rant about internet standards, e-mail, plus-aliases, and why reading the RFCs matters. The Internet is a mess E-Mail is a mess. It has been around since the 80s and has been implemented hundreds, if not thousands, of times by different people, in different ways, with different levels of compatibility. But: everything in the internet that has to be interoperable and that is older than 1 year is a mess. As humans, we never get a design right on the first try. People want new features. Security issues are found. So a new scheme is designed. But because not everyone will upgrade to the new scheme (because of cost, unawareness, loss of skilled staff, or just not caring), the updated scheme has to be backwards compatible with the old scheme. And what is worse, many did not even implement the old scheme correctly.