5 ms·
Reminds me of sites not accepting "+" in an email address, even though it's a completely valid character to use before the "@".
by amatecha 6y ago
Reminds me of sites not accepting "+" in an email address, even though it's a completely valid character to use before the "@".
- u801e 6y agoSome websites accept them when creating an account, but not when trying to log in with that account.
- rlayton2 6y agoYeah, I've had this a few times trying to register accounts for my kids at MYNAME+KIDSNAME@gmail.com
- bad_user 6y agoAlso some of those same websites allow you to change your email address and then lock you out.
- hattar 6y agoLooking at you, Alamo Drafthouse
- firethief 6y agoI encounter that a lot with passwords. Amazing how many websites break in weird ways when your password manager throws in random symbols...
- frickinLasers 6y agoEven if they have validation built in when you are signing up! How is it possible that they have taken steps to ensure passwords meet their stringent criteria, but the user still ends up unable to log in? Most recently, I've experienced this problem with two of the big three credit bureaus.
- Tagbert 6y agoBecause they neither know nor care about security and customer service?
- wyattpeak 6y agoThis happens with AWS, which I find just incredible. It'll silently accept a password when changing, but fail when you try to log in. I think in that case it might a matter of length, rather than symbols, but I've never put in the effort to pin down the problem exactly, now that my password manager settings work.
- jjoonathan 6y agoThat sounds pretty typical of AWS though. Like, I caught them doing the "ask for FQDN but reject FQDNs" a couple of weeks ago in either Route53 or something immediately adjacent (i.e. where people who know better should have been involved), yesterday SageMaker stopped launching kernels because of a "known issue" (don't worry, it doesn't meet the definition of downtime though), and today I had to diagnose an unresponsive control panel by opening the console and digging up a REST error response that they didn't bother to handle in any way. Everything about AWS is not merely broken and half-assed, but fractally so, so that even after using a service for years you are still uncovering severe caveats and awkward limitations. Password validation traps fit that pattern to a T.
- ajmurmann 6y agoI wonder if it silently truncates long password on setup. When you then submit the full password it doesn't match.
- gdhbcc 6y agoNot just websites, I've had windows services fail because I happened to have a "\" in the password of the service user running it
- mike_d 6y agoIn 100% of cases, this is either because someone copied a bad regexp, or they made an explicit decision to not allow local-part wildcarding. I have in the past normalized email addresses per the rules I know specific providers have to help people login. Did I sign up with mike+hn@ or mike+hackernews@?
- moonchild 6y agoStore email and username (if applicable) in password manager alongside the password.
- Whitestrake 6y agoI sign up with your website @ my website. For example: ycombinator.com@example.com. Nobody blocks dots in email addresses, although I have had some sites in the past email me using the first part of my email address as my name; it's amusing to open an email from example.com saying "Hi, example.com!"
- _0ffh 6y agoFunny, that's exactly how I do it! One of the reasons is, I know who lost/leaked/sold my data when the spam starts coming in. (Of course today we also have haveibeenpwned.)
- Avamander 6y agoThat's not the worst, most websites totally reject any form fields not US-ASCII, very anglo-centric and annoying.
- walrus01 6y agoI have an address that is firstname@lastname.com and am unable to use it on a number of ecommerce sites, because they're doing some sort of validation to filter out people who are too clueless to know what an email address is. Or something. There's no + or other special characters in it, or xn-- international domain name.
- JoshGlazebrook 6y agoYikes. I've got my own first@firstlast.com but I've never ran into an instance where I wasn't able to use it. I do now have a hyphen in my last name which is not accepted everywhere. Some companies accept the hyphen but replace it with a space (some credit cards), some reject the hyphen so I either make it all one word or add my own space.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- walrus01 6y agoI wonder if yours is more successful because the domain is firstlast.com , not just lastname.com. I've run into it most often with checkout systems that have separate fields for first and last name, it appears that some systems are matching for the field for last name cannot be exactly the same as the part of the email address after the @ symbol.
- KingMachiavelli 6y agoWhat category of site do you observe this issue on? My curiosity suggests that there may be a huge UX problem for extreamly popular sites; banks, government services, etc., where a large percentage of their usage base absolutely will entery 100% incorrect information unless extrenous safe guards are in place. Essentialy, if your site targeted every age demographic or even had a preference for older and/or less tech savy demographics, how can you prioritize the edge case that <0.00001% of your users has their own lastname.tld vs is entering an incorrect email address.
- Zobat 6y agoThe discussion about valid email addresses reminded me of this article: https://haacked.com/archive/2007/08/21/i-knew-how-to-validate-an-email-address-until-i.aspx/ https://haacked.com/archive/2007/08/21/i-knew-how-to-validat... For any programmer that's ever tried to validate email addresses it's an eye opener.
- throwaway9d0291 6y agoFastmail has a feature it calls "subdomain addressing" [0], where instead of "me+thing@mysite.com", you use "thing@me.mysite.com", which is much better supported. Other hosts (e.g. Mailbox.org, the host I'm with now) can support the feature as well, with some configuration. [0]: https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/addressing.html https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/addressing.html
- rntksi 6y agoI have a 4 letter tld to my domain name for my email address. The two times that I had to chase up someone to let me create an account was absolutely bonkers. And it only happened with two systems that were crucial: my bank, and my company's payment system.