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Comment by roryisok | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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 :-)

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