The best way to validate an email address: Send an email that they need to click on (or an email with a code they need to enter), OR ask the OAuth provider wit

The best way to validate an email address: Send an email that they need to click on (or an email with a code they need to enter), OR ask the OAuth provider with authority for it to validate it (i.e. Google Oauth for Google addresses, Windows Live for Microsoft Accounts, etc). The best way to identify someone with an email address: Store a canonical version of their email address alongside the users email. Use the canonical version when signing-in/identifying and the raw version originally supplied to send email. This is the only way to not have duplicate accounts for firstlast@googlemail.com vs first.last@googlemail.com vs first.last@gmail.com . The canonical email is always lowercase, no dots, no + part, no prefix or suffix columns, known domain aliases are normalised to the most common alias (googlemail.com > gmail.com). I wrote a SQL canonical email func recently (in preparation for Persona shut-down) if anyone is interested: https://github.com/microcosm-cc/microcosm/blob/master/db/migrations/20160831112556_canonical_email.sql https://github.com/microcosm-cc/microcosm/blob/master/db/mig...