Rakuten Bank, Anytime Fitness (yes, it’s from the US, but I’m talking about the Japanese one), and some other websites don’t want me to reuse the same email address after I delete my accounts.
Are they using the email address as a unique key in the database or something? What’s the point? Why are they doing this? Does no one know that people can still use the same email address by just adding “+”? Is it that hard to find reasonable back-end developers in Japan?
by LovingKindness94
8 comments
>Â Is it that hard to find reasonable back-end developers in Japan?
Front end, too.
I’m not very clever. How would you use a plus sign to continue using a given address?
> reuse the same email address after I delete my accounts.
One potential case is there could have been a sign-up promotion or similar offer, and they don’t want people to keep getting it by making/deleting accounts, I guess? But in that situation I’d probably do more than just email check, idk. Actually, now that I think about it, (not that I’ve actively looked) but most services that offered account deletion usually said something along the lines of “once you delete, you can’t create a new account using same email” so maybe it’s just a thing(tm) in Japan.
> Does no one know that people can still use the same email address by just adding “+”
I had an insurance company forbid logging in with them one day despite my mail going there and having used the same email with a plus sign for years. I gave them a year to sort it. They did not and lost my business. And, no, they wouldn’t just delete the “+something” part of my email; I asked if they were willing to do that and they told me to create a new account (but gave no sign of being able to just move the policy, either). My policy, on a page I couldn’t access to print out or anything, renewed automatically via my credit card during that time.
My personal opinion is that a company whose name is kinda like bokio barine can eat a bag of dicks and never get my business again.
Edit: Oh, for your actual why question, developers will often put a unique index/key on an email field to avoid people signing up with the same email multiple times for a variety of reasons. If someone wanted 20 accounts for the same address and we send some newsletter the user opted in for or an invoice or something, that looks very suspicious to the receiving email server with modern spam/etc. checking.
> Are they using the email address as a unique key in the database or something? What’s the point?
It’s the easiest way to make sure that one email address per account.
> Does no one know that people can still use the same email address by just adding “+”?
Yes. One of the commenters here didn’t know.
Yes, I know people at Rakuten and they do. That trick is not as commonly known as you think.
> Why do some Japanese websites
Each site is made by different developers so you can’t really compare why they do something or not. However, the knowledge of what is accepted as standard in the rest of the world is different. They are more likely to base the requirements and just the way it works based on older popular Japanese websites, like Yahoo, Rakuten etc rather than overseas standards.
Why are you deleting accounts just to re-make them later?