Lost accounts

A_A@lemmy.world to Lemmy.World Announcements@lemmy.world – 15 points –

The registration process doesn't validate (bad)email addresses resulting in non_recuperable accounts

11

Can you DM me the account name you're having problems with?

My concern is more with the involuntary trashing of the namespace : an account registration should be dropped if not validated after a certain amount of time.

Yes that's a good idea, could you raise it as enhancement request here: https://github.com/LemmyNet

Please, can someone (lemmyist) with an account on GitHub do this ... as I have no knowledge about it 🙏

@A_A Thanks for letting me know about the issue. I ran into the same issue with my gmail, but it worked with every other email I had, so thought it was just a one off.
I will look more into it. See if switching to a different email provider fixes the issue.

There really isn't a reliable way to "validate" email addresses other than to try sending email to them.

An email address has two parts, separated by the @ sign: the "local part" and the domain. The domain has to follow the rules of DNS, but there are astonishingly few hard rules for the local part.

A validator can check that the domain resolves — that there's an A or MX record for it in DNS — but it can't do much about the part before the @ sign.

Whether the local part is correct or not depends on the actual behavior of the mail server for the domain; which means that, without actually trying to send email to it, it can't really be tested.

What about users who want to intentionally register without an email address? Maybe to give more anonymity to their account?

There are some instances that don't require emails, albeit mainly privacy-focused ones though with manual account approvals

You'll want to get in contact with your instance admin to get that untangled

I did contact him inside this post, now I realize it's a problem for each and every instances !
Edit : in fact, only the instances that requires email for registration.