I stumbled across this site yesterday, digg.com, which allows you, the user, to rate articles submitted by other users.  The more ratings or the more people "dig" an article, the higher in rank it goes.  At some point, if enough people dig it, it'll get promoted to their front page.  I love the idea and I want to start using it.  

So yesterday, I signed up for an account.  After entering my email, choosing a screen name and password I was promised that they'd send me an email so I could confirm and start using my account.  Now, almost 24 hours later I have yet to see the email and I'm beginning to think that it's never going to come.  To be honest, I had it go to my hotmail account and I'm sure that it's their fault; in fact I'm almost certain.  

Now for my problem:  How do I get them to send me another confirmation?  To that end, will it fail with Hotmails spam filters?  I tried to go back and re-sign up but my screen name has been taken and the same goes for my email address.  Damn!  I'm basically fucked.  I'll go ahead and send the obligatory email to digg.com first to see if they can resolve this for me, I'm sure they will, but it has me wondering about something else.

My personal side project, pytheus.com - a personal web assistant, is being built with security in mind and one of the main points is email confirmation for new accounts.  Now, since the domain is fairly new and I run my own email server the chances of one or many spam filters will block my mail is great.  In fact I know this because xerratus.com and me-nikk.com email, which I also administer, get bounced a lot; mostly AOL, Hotmail and Earthlink.  

So what am I to do with my new site?  One option I'm investigating is to let the user opt to use an alternate email address, one I've set up thru Gmail.  By doing this, I'm now concerned that people won't take my site seriously.  My thinking is that Gmail is so widely known and used, spam filters wont block it.  In fact, my testing of this has proved true; none of my emails get bounced when I select to use the alternative method when signing up for an account thru pytheus.  When I don't select it, almost half of the emails bounce back.

In this day in age, with all the spam filtering that is going on, thanks to asshat spammers, is there other options out there for confirming accounts other than email?  Also, if that email ever gets blocked, should there be a way to re-send the email or have an option to confirm by other means?

Any ideas?

UPDATE: After contacting digg.com about my problem, someone from digg support activated my account.  Thanks digg.  Fuckin hotmail filters!