Apparent Bug in Forum Software

It has taken me two weeks to get to where I can post a question to the forum, all because the forum software did not like my email address, which had a hyphen in the username and another hyphen in the domain name. No error message, it just failed to send the email to validate that the email address was a working address.

To further aggravate the matter, Cox technical support (basic level) insisted that this was a non-problem.
"If you think that the software may not like your email address, just use a different one. Like gmail."

I am posting this here in the hope that Cox will FIX the problem. Or if they cannot fix it, give me an error message when I SET the email address in my forum profile.