Okay, I was able to get another account signed up, but I had to do it from another StackExchange site because coming from SuperUser.com doesn't work for some reason. Here's a message on the other site describing my continued problems (I hope the merge didn't trigger other problems): meta.skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/1288/…

@Tom Wijsman: Well, this shouldn't be an issue anyway because I got signed up with Stack Exchange's OpenID system using a real eMail address (not "[email protected]"). At this point, I still can't access SuperUser.com and so I'm unable to contribute -- all the other sites are working fine, but Stack Exchange's OpenID system is still a problem so I suppose it'll only be a matter of time before I'm somehow logged out of those too.

@Tom Wijsman: The "example.com" domain (and a few others) are reserved according to section 3 of RFC 2606 (Reserved Top Level DNS Names), which is why it's owned by IANA. The problem with using a dedicated account as you suggest is that it becomes yet another account that needs to be maintained -- eMail addresses in the "example.com" domain are true throw-away addresses. Out of frustration with having to unsubscribe from various services (and their countless partners) that use opt-out policies, I, like many others, have resorted to using example.com, etc.

@Daniel Beck: When I signed up with OpenID, I used one of my real eMail addresses that I use to send and receive eMail every day. When I first encountered this web site I used "[email protected]" as I often do (and many others do) to avoid the time-wasting hassle of getting spammed and nagged and harassed about a wide variety of things (as, unfortunately, is the result of providing one's eMail address to many web sites these days).