Ask HN: Is email address the wrong choice for usernames? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is email address the wrong choice for usernames?

4 pointsdnsworks4 comments

I've recently decided that I just don't care about e-mail anymore. If somebody really needs to talk to me, they can call me, SMS me, or instant message me. There's nobody in my personal or professional life who does not have access to these three forms of communication.<p>That being said, I'm starting to doubt the usefulness of E-mail itself. I've decided to run an experiment, and am deleting the MX records/disabling inbound mail processing for my primary email domain for a week or two. The only caveat here is that I've found some sites will lock an account, or at least nag you to death if they are unable to email you.<p>I used to be in the camp of "everybody has an email address, it's the perfect UUID". Now I'm not so sure. I'd like to live without email, because some combination of spammers and relatives have long-since made email a miserable experience.<p>What do you think? Email as a username, or not?

I think email is still somewhat necessary. First of all, you aren't everyone, just because email isn't useful for you doesn't mean it's not useful for your users. Second of all, most web apps require an email address to sign up, if for no other reason than to send a forgotten password reset. So even all those kids who really don't have a use for email still have an email address to sign up for things like Facebook. Speaking of Facebook, this service and others have a lot of resources to research these sorts of things, and they still use email as a signup.

As a user, I prefer when a service uses email for usernames. One reason is that I can remember my email address, even if I don't use it. Often I forget the usernames that I use to sign up for various services. The other reason is that I know my email address is going to be unique, so that saves me from playing the "username is already taken" game.

I don't really have a problem with spam or known email users who are over active. Gmail does a pretty damn good job of filtering the spam. Custom filters do a good job of clearing things that aren't really spam but still annoying.

Email as a username has its advantages and it has its drawbacks:

  - drawbacks

    - spam

    - they change

    - they get hacked, which in turn means your accounts have been hacked

  - advantages

    - easy to remember
  
    - immediate conduit to your user

    - automatic recovery built in (see drawbacks)

    - built in verification of identity (somewhat) of user

It's a tough choice. We used to use email addresses but of late we have switched to simply allowing people to pick a unique nickname.

The deciding factor was the fact that more and more people perceive giving their email address to a service as a serious barrier to participation.

I have enough RSI that I don't do SMS or instant messaging. If I wanted to talk to you, but it wasn't worth a phone call, I'd punt.

My solution to many of the general set of problems with email you cite was to get a Fastmail account (https://www.fastmail.fm), which does a fantastic job of spam filtering and would allow you to filter the email from those pesky relatives.

And as gexla notes, you must have a working email address to do a whole bunch of things on the net.

To comply with RFC2142 you must have an abuse@domain.tld email address which goes to an appropriate recipient(!) - http://www.rfc-ignorant.org/policy-abuse.php .

But you're not required to care.

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