Comment by inopinatus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by inopinatus | Hacker News Reader

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I think the people in this thread saying things like "getting an email account is easy" need to spend more time observing some non-tech folks using a computer. Because actually that is a substantial barrier for ordinary people.

My service accepts both an email address and a membership number, and this helps enormously with account recovery in the astonishingly frequent case that someone changes job or ISP and loses access to their original mailbox. And it's amazing the number of people who mistype their email address.

For sign-in, we accept either and simply detect which one was used.

This also helps us to support multiple profiles per email address, which is a common case for families using our service.

Is getting an email address for tech folks even "easy" these days? Most services now seem to require a mobile phone number (virtual numbers like Skype numbers seem to be excluded). There are also various mobile operators whose numbers don't work, for whatever reason.

I've personally found getting a new address from gmail etc often problematic.

Gmail maybe, making an account at mail.com was dead easy. On the flip side, you have to keep pointing out "mail, without a g at the beginning," so who knows if that's worth it.

Gmail actually banks on the idea that most people just fill out whatever fields they are presented. The phone number is not actually required to register an account.

If you keep using the account at one point you'll be required to add your phone number or you won't be able to login.

I would be questioning if people without an email address are actually going to be interested in using anything I am building. In most cases I would imagine not (but my company's target market is 18-25 year old europeans).

Rather than imagine, you should probably do some market testing. Here's a single data point to get you started: last time I talked to a late-teenage member of my family about email, they called it "old", and weren't even sure what their address was.

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