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Comment by anonu | Hacker News Reader

Unrelated to TLDs but on the subject of email validation: I like to put a +<some sort of tag> after the name on my Gmail address. This is a perfectly legitimate thing to do to tag your emails. Most websites I've come across don't accept such an email address.

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I've also yet to find a website that isn't fooled by gmail's dot trick. They all thing myname@gmail.com is a different address to my.name@gmail.com. In fairness this is not an email standard, but you'd think devs would have copped this by now and started to recognise multiple signups from the same user

Validator[0] node package seems to have a "normalizeEmail" function, site operators just need to start using it.

0: https://www.npmjs.com/package/validator

Or maybe they should send email to the address their users give them?

A human creating many alt accounts may not be desirable by a website owner, so requiring multiple real email inboxes or running a mail server adds another barrier to prevent spam.

Not really. I understand why website owners would like that, but it's simply not possible. In the worst case user will use mailcatch.com, aliases or one-time email accounts. No way you can check if the e-mail address is a "real" one. Fortunatelly.

You can’t entirely prevent it but you can certainly raise the bar enough to deter a substantial fraction of those signing up multiple times. Whether that’s worth the effort or not it a business decision.

Well now I’m really happy that some library doesn’t know how to remove the sub-addresses on my custom e-mail setup :-)

Other email services might not ignore periods, and might really have separate myname@example.com and my.name@example.com users. If someone is going to make a site that tries to ignore periods for equality, then they should hardcode it to email domains that they know do that.

Yes, that's what I meant by it not being a standard. They should be making a special rule for gmail

Honestly though: why bother? If you're really set on opening a second account, email validations won't stop you. If I as a service provider want to stop you, I'd check your address, credit card number, vat Id, etc.

If you're unsure whether you've already registered an account, I could understand the frustration of finding your "proper" dot configuration, but as a developer I'd figure that to be your problem.

I'm in a habit of putting it in and it seems to be about 50/50 as to whether or not any given site will accept it. Surprisingly, I've run into at least one YC company which doesn't like it.

It's rarer now than in the past, but I too still encounter sites occasionally that won't let me use the +label form.

I'm in progress to migrating to an e-mail in my own domain, and I'm enjoying the extra control it gives me. I now use e-mails in the form of label@username.mydomain, which get internally translated to username+label@mydomain. Beyond solving problems with broken registration forms, it also makes it more difficult for spammers/data brokers to normalize the address - I assume most won't bother.

Still works on Twitter an other top 100 sites, but many examples of regex matching skip this valid and useful case.

With Gmail you can move the dot around, it's effectively stripped, to make sorta unique ones. But everyone serious about validating against Gmail knows to strip it out.

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