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Comment by ukulele | Hacker News Reader

We've had "magic" links as the primary sign in method for our site for about a year now. It works well but we very regularly get requests to allow password login. So much so that we'll introduce that eventually.

Seems like both in combo could be a nice solution, but I'm sure we'll just start getting support requests from people whose password doesn't work because they never set one...

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Interestingly, we replaced our login with magic links only over a year ago. We have roughly 1600-2000 active users, and as far as I know, we've never had anyone request a password login.

Not that I think about it.. it's kinda suspicious that no one has asked for it in all this time. Hmm..

Did you have issues with delayed email delivery (the user wants to login but the email is delayed because of some grey listing or some network glitch)?

No, we use Postmark which delivers very fast.

We use Mailgun which delivers quite fast, but we noticed that some customers, especially the big companies with an IT department running its own email server, tend to have some form of greylisting: if it is the first time they receive an email from our system, then they refuse it temporarily, and ask our system to retry in (for example) 5 minutes. Mailgun manages this nicely, but during those 5 minutes, the user is still waiting his/her magic link.

Postmark doesn't allow marketing emails, so their reputation scores are better and hence they have better deliverability. That's their main value prop.

I know about this, and about Postmark great deliverability, but the greylisting some companies use is naive and doesn't care about reputation: if you are a new sender, you to have wait 5 minutes and retry, whoever is sending (Postmark or Mailgun).

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