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I want to register users on the basis of their emaild ids on my website, assuming that there is one to one relationship between users and their emailid strings. But gmail doesn't recongnize .s in email ids. That means juzerali@gmail.com and juzer.ali@gmail.com are the same users (or emaild ids).

My concern is not just this one use case, it could be overcome by simply stripping the string of dots. Different email providers might be having different policies regarding email aliases and notations.

My question to community is is there any de facto rules/guidelines for creating unique users based on their email ids as their unique identifiers? Or has someone implemented this successfully before?

NOTES: I have checked a few websites that registers on the basis of email id. They seem consider two gmail ids with different combinations with .s as different email ids. That means same email account holder can possess two accounts on the same site, which I want to avoid.

IMPORTANT: Oauth/OpenID is not an option.

Juzer Ali
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1 Answers1

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Try facebook login and get username from the facebook API. But if you dont want to access any secondary service for auth, then you might as well ask users to choose a username, and constrain uniqueness there. As far as i know there is nothing more you can do!

Hotmail for example allows you to have any string after a +

for eg. abc@hotmail.com is same as abc+123@hotmail.com
ConfusedAboutCPP
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  • I have clearly stated that OAuth is not an option so I can't use facebook. Thanks for pointing out hotmail stuff, I think other email providers too offer the same. – Juzer Ali May 03 '12 at 10:36