Let’s talk about usernames

Re:Let’s talk about usernames by tbabb on Monday February 12, 2018 @03:20AM (#16357292)

My thought would be to have two distinct fields: "normalized" and "pristine" version of the user's email. Then always mail to exactly what the user typed ("pristine"), and use the "normalized" mail to prevent multiple registrations to "john.doe@gmail" and "johndoe@gmail" and "johndoe+1@gmail" and "[email protected]" and so on.

Denying registration to a suspected-duplicate seems a lot safer than mailing to a different person.

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Re:Let’s talk about usernames by __david__ on Monday February 12, 2018 @05:01AM (#16357686)

If you're going to do that then only do it for email addresses where you understand the local MTA conventions (like gmail). Do not do it for domains you don't know (because you cannot predict how they work).

For instance, on my email domain, [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected] are all the same ('+', '.' and '_' all act like you'd expect '+' to), but [email protected] is not (it get's picked off and aliased somewhere else). Applying gmail conventions to other domains is silly and wrong.

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