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Comment by cowsandmilk | Hacker News Reader

> There was this awesome bug with AWS a while back too where you could accidentally sign up an account twice

Not a bug, this has been amazon's philosophy with accounts on all systems from very early on. Some of the initial designers of amazon knew families where multiple people shared one e-mail address, but wanted separate accounts for shopping.

Multiple accounts per e-mail address was a concious design decision for all Amazon systems.

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A poorly implemented design decision then (which they turned off on AWS back in 2012 due to exactly this happening to many people). https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=101218

There was no way at the time for me to a) see that I had a second account associated with my email address or b) reset the password for the second account without going through support c) merging the two accounts into one even with supports help.

Indeed. Multiple accounts per email is the most legacy of legacy features, and it's actually pretty easy to not realize it exists even if you work for Amazon. I'm not surprised internal systems don't handle it well. If I recall right, there was a push to get customers to move off it, using site messaging etc, because it was such a pain to maintain.

I have that problem at my current job. The average user is probably 60. Our policy is to tell people that email accounts are free. Our primary concern is that people would recover the password to someone else's account and access data that we only let the other person access.

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