#Gmail allows users to insert dots anywhere in the username of their address, and still receive messages. A gmail username is tested for uniqueness with all dots removed. This is a nifty feature, which probably prevents some accidental mistakes leading to undelivered emails. On the other hand, it's often abused by spammers to get around unique email constraints in registration.
What do you think about preventing users from signing up with the same gmail account more than once? Heavy handed?
@andrewfeeney i think about this a lot mostly with gmails who+alias@domain.tld stuff, stripping out the +alias. always come back to i'd not use a service doing it to me.
@andrewfeeney Gmail (like many other e-mail providers) also supports plus-addressing (account+foo@gmail.com) and the alternative domain googlemail.com (at least for users from Germany that registered before the dispute was resolved). So there are many ways to get an alias for an e-mail and I would not try to block that (i.e. Microsoft Exchange allowed plus-characters for the regular account names in the past).
Nevertheless, this sounds like something that could be included in a spam rating.
@andrewfeeney Seems like it would take approximately an extra 3 seconds to get another fake email address if someone wanted one.
If you're trying to stop people making a mistake it might be useful, if you're trying to stop people deliberately registering two accounts its seems unlikely to work.
I have multiple accounts in places for good reasons often. Denying an email address will just make me fallback on another one of my domain names while tutting and wondering if the competition is so annoying.
@pre Yeah, see that's the thing. In this case. I don't care if individuals are signing up for more than one account for whatever reason. What I want to prevent is hundreds of automated signups by bots. But there's probably better ways to reduce that that don't mess with potentially legitimate use cases. Plus, anyone can just use +arbitrary_suffix which is a legitimate use case I would never want to prevent.
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