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Comment by kagakuninja | Hacker News Reader

Because comcast subscribers lose their email address when switching email providers, and the address becomes available to other subscribers.

This happened to me, and I cannot use my comcast email with google services, and some others. I need a separate email address for job hunting, because google calendar will assume the provided email address is linked to google services, and the notifications will go to the other guy.

It is really fucking annoying.

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This is solvable by using a more stable email provider, ideally with your own domain. And yes I know domains need to be much easier for the average person to use (and avoid accidentally losing). That's one reason I run a domain registrar, to try and make this more accessible.

Once someone has their own domain, it also opens up things such as hosting your own IdP (or paying a small monthly fee to have someone else host it for you) and sidestepping email entirely.

> This is solvable by using a more stable email provider, ideally with your own domain.

Sure, but requiring ordinary people to do this is essentially a nonstarter. The whole point of SSO is to minimize user friction. Requiring a user to also set up a special email account with another service is a dramatic increase in friction, and I expect that a large percentage of users simply won't do it. Why would they?

The main problem would be solved by using a Gmail account, right?

also known in industry as Account Takover

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