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Ask HN: What do you do when emails are no longer a one to one relationship?
1 point by matttah on Oct 1, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 1 comment
Recently I've been working on a website that uses users school email addresses. Many schools will reuse your email address once you graduate. This means that an email is no longer seen as one email per person. A single email could belong to multiple people over time. What happens when a person with a reused email address tries to sign up for your site?

People who have been in this situation, how do you handle it? Do you try to set some sort of "you've graduated, what's your new email?" or do you send some sort of alert when someone tries to sign up with the same school email?




its kind of a pain for the users, but the best solution might be to have them re-verify their email addresses on maybe a 6 month term.

its how my 401k account works, since your email address might change at any given time along with your job.




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