Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses
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Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses
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Re: Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses
#2I enjoyed the deep dice. A lot of sensible advice, and enjoyed the deep dive. A lot of articles do not get a lot of that as right as this article does.
Anyone who also enjoyed it would probably get a kick out of my article on the same subject that goes into the regex (which has some valid use cases): https://hackernoon.com/on-the-practicality-of-regex-for-emai...
Re: Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses
#3Add the lie "emails are delivered instantly, so the user can click a link I email them within 1 minute"
And the lie "users always read emails on the same device they're logging into a website with"
And the lie "users can always view HTML email so no need to send a plaintext equivalent, especially if I have a long complex URL I want them to click"
And the lie "Clickable links sent in email are more secure than passwords so I'll stop supporting passwords and instead rely on email delivery of a link for all logins. Whoever clicks that link first is definitely the user who wanted to log in"
Re: Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses
#4The plus sign is a pet peeve of mine, too. But I stopped keeping a list of bad sites when their number has become double digit!
Re: Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses
#5Add the lie "emails are delivered instantly, so the user can click a link I email them within 1 minute" And the lie "users always read emails on the same device they're logging into a website with" And the lie "users can always view HTML email so no need to send a plaintext equivalent, especially if I have a long complex URL I want them to click" And the lie "Clickable links sent in email are more secure than passwor…
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Re: Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses
#6Add the lie "emails are delivered instantly, so the user can click a link I email them within 1 minute" And the lie "users always read emails on the same device they're logging into a website with" And the lie "users can always view HTML email so no need to send a plaintext equivalent, especially if I have a long complex URL I want them to click" And the lie "Clickable links sent in email are more secure than passwor…
If you have a password reset form, you probably already have a log-in with email with extra steps functionality.
Re: Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses
#7Add the lie "emails are delivered instantly, so the user can click a link I email them within 1 minute" And the lie "users always read emails on the same device they're logging into a website with" And the lie "users can always view HTML email so no need to send a plaintext equivalent, especially if I have a long complex URL I want them to click" And the lie "Clickable links sent in email are more secure than passwor…
> Clickable links sent in email are more secure than passwords so I'll stop supporting passwords and instead rely on email delivery of a link for all logins
God, I fucking hate that.
I have a fucking password manager, I have various machines and things open. Just let me fucking log in.
If anyone is reading this who is in charge of the internet please stop doing this.
Re: Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses
#8This article says that Gmail can't handle address literals. I personally wrote the IPv6 address literal support for Gmail, so this annoys me. I just tested it and it shortened "[IPv6:2001:etc:etc::192.etc.etc]" down to "@2001" then generated an extremely terse mail delivery subsystem notification that I've never seen before. Which is why you should never just rewrite software without understanding why all the test cases are in the test suite!
Re: Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses
#9Add the lie "emails are delivered instantly, so the user can click a link I email them within 1 minute" And the lie "users always read emails on the same device they're logging into a website with" And the lie "users can always view HTML email so no need to send a plaintext equivalent, especially if I have a long complex URL I want them to click" And the lie "Clickable links sent in email are more secure than passwor…
> Clickable links sent in email are more secure than passwords so I'll stop supporting passwords and instead rely on email delivery of a link for all logins God, I fucking hate that. I have a fucking password manager, I have various machines and things open. Just let me fucking log in. If anyone is reading this who is in charge of the internet please stop doing this.
The people in charge of the internet are "cybersecurity" "professionals" who can't even follow NIST guidance.
Re: Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses
#10> It’s likely that more people out there are being filtered by badly-implemented form validation than there are being filtered by their own need of hand-holding.
I wish this was asserted with evidence. The author might suggest this because they have unrealistic views of some users.
> In the year of our lord 2026, you can reasonably expect your users to know how to type their own email address - or even better, auto-input from their OS, browser, keyboard app, or password manager.
This really depends on who your users are.
I have multiple family members who have healthy memory, but can't accurately remember their email address everytime: the localpart, the domain, the syntax, everything.
Sending an email verification isn't sufficient, because if the user has typo'd ".com", they might never receive that email, and the user might never be back, or then have to escalate to support.
Meanwhile, if a site is opinionated on TLDs, they might prevent those users facing issues.
I'm sure there are many sites were users have a large variety of odd email addresses, but also there are sites that cater to mostly non-technical users within 1-2 locales, and so may find the friendliest UX is having opinionated validation.