You're right and wrong. Right because it's a crazy idea. Wrong, because it's the logical conclusion of the belief that emails must be treated with as much care

You're right and wrong. Right because it's a crazy idea. Wrong, because it's the logical conclusion of the belief that emails must be treated with as much care as passwords. If you really think that, then you need to encrypt them, and therefore you have to give up the ability to look up user accounts by email address. All you could do is verify that a user-submitted email is associated with a user-submitted account. That's where you end up when you have that sort of paranoia about email addresses. But that conclusion is, like you said, absurd, and I never should've implied otherwise. I wasn't thinking when I wrote it.