Multiple accounts with the same email haven't been available for many, many years. I'm not sure exactly when registration for these was disabled, but it was 10+ years ago. Possibly 15-20 years ago.

I think it was a valid design decision at the time, before accounts on websites were widespread and a family might only have a single email address from their ISP.

The rise of free webmail accounts from Hotmail etc changed that, of course. And now we have a shared understanding of how accounts on websites should work. Neither of those were true in 1994.

Good to know. I had accidentally created multiple accounts for myself around '05 or so and was really surprised by it. Iirc back then they also required separate accounts per-country, but I could be wrong about that.

I don't think they require separate accounts per-country, but my only experience is with .com and .ca. They might do the accounts on a per-realm basis (North America, Far East, Europe, etc.) rather than strictly per-country.

I have same account (same mail) with amazon that works across their .com, .in, .fr., .co.uk

They still do AFAICT (I had to sign up for a Japanese account relatively recently).

Amazon Japan and Amazon China are the only ones that have separate accounts from the rest of the Amazon sites.

Naw, I left about 10 years ago and out was still there, and still had co-workers at a different job asking me about it a couple years later, because they got bit by it.

The justification I heard was that someone would have a personal and business (or library) account to the same email, but it definitely persisted longer than you think.

Well, they were enabled but you couldn't create new ones when I joined 7 years ago. I was under the impression they'd long since been retired at that point. Given the turnover there, ancient lore could have only been a year or two before that.

I had to jump through some hoops to get one of the accounts to test something I worked on with them.

Doesn't seem stupid to me. In the real world can have multiple accounts with a business using the same physical address. Why should contact information be limited to a single account? Why should an email address be assumed to uniquely identify a person? Email sharing is still very common, and many organizations have addresses like info@ or help@ that don't identify anyone at all and could be read by any number of people.