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Comment by ollysb | Hacker News Reader

Here's what would be great for users, being able to sign in with _any_ of their email addresses and passwords. If you could register all of your email addresses and passwords then login would become as easy as entering the first set of details you think of.

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That's an interesting idea. How would you go about collecting all these emails first though?

Would you tell the user to "just enter all email addresses you ever registered" and then send confirmation emails to all of them? I'd imagine this ending with one or two confirmed email addresses and maybe 3 additional unconfirmed ones.

When the user then tries to use one of the unconfirmed addresses to sign in — what do you do? Refuse log in because the address is not confirmed? Send another confirmation email to that account and ask the user to confirm it? List those confirmed addresses in the account and ask the user if he wants to sign in with one of them?

No need to send confirmation emails. Let him login with any email address. If the authentication is successful, you let him in. At this stage, it is a new account so give him an option to link this new account with his existing account with your service. If he had already provided all his email addresses with the first account, there is no need to authenticate one more time. Otherwise, simply authenticate once more with the original email and link the accounts if successful.

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