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Some of our customers (school districts) regularly recycle email addresses for students, reassigning an address to a new student after even just one year. That’
by aaronharnly 3y ago
Some of our customers (school districts) regularly recycle email addresses for students, reassigning an address to a new student after even just one year. That’s fine(ish?), but problematic when they don’t also provide a stable unique identifier that can signal the change. Identity management is a remarkably messy and hard problem — one of those areas where the “corner cases” add up to an order of magnitude more work than the core solution.
- nvm0n2 3y agoIt's not really fine and no organization should do that. The assumption that one email address = one person is too deeply embedded into the infrastructure. Tech firms mostly get this right. Consumer Google accounts are never reused for example. Yes it means the namespace becomes polluted over time and some people might have numbers at the end of their email address, and that's a pity, but compared to the pain of reallocating addresses it's not very important.