No, they probably didn't actually get up in the morning and decide to do me in. I suspect that particular problem was either giving it to an overzealous cleanin

No, they probably didn't actually get up in the morning and decide to do me in. I suspect that particular problem was either giving it to an overzealous cleaning algorithm or--as you say--passing it over an http connection without escaping it properly. A third possibility is that it was given to a mainframe application written in the 1970s that uses brutal hackery to deal with email addresses. Such kludges are often redolent with broken edge cases.