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Comment by sotix | Hacker News Reader

Careful with this method. I was unable to purchase plane tickets from Southwest or even change my email address because they changed their parsing rules on me and silently dropped the plus. I found out most airlines don't have a ticket counter to buy a ticket the old fashioned way! But the premier help can issue tickets. Took me two months to have CS get someone to run a DML to remove my "bad" email address.

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It's probably easier to tell them "I lost access to that email, I need to set up a new account". People do this all the time.

On some level, my employer uses emails as the primary key for customer accounts, the baseline identifier which all information is filed under. It's quite ridiculous.

I did, but the CS agent kept trying to change the email to a new one when I told them I had lost access, and the validation failed because it wanted to send an email to the old address about the email being updated and couldn't. They didn't have the right tools to fix it.

Had to get an engineer involved.

> On some level, my employer uses emails as the primary key for customer accounts, the baseline identifier which all information is filed under. It's quite ridiculous.

I've lost track of the number of places that use the e-mail as an unchangeable identifier. Bonus points for my company liking to change domain names for sport, which just confuses support.

And even big tech companies, who should know better, do this. Like the big blue CDN that's in the middle of half the web's traffic. Who also, for some reason, can't be arsed to send e-mails reliably if you need to change your account.

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