rkoul

Haha! I'd agree and it is one of the reason why I hadn't been on it for over a year. It is just that a part of me would rather leave on its own terms, than be forced out - which is what this is!

On a different note, I can survive not being on Facebook, but I often dread what would happen if I were ever to lose access to my gmai? The aftermath would be a massive, massive pain in the wrong place..

How did we end up with our identities so entrenched with just a few corporate entities? I wish things were easy to switch

You are assuming that the said site has an email confirmation workflow as part of the registration process (Granted most do these days, but it wasn't the case many years earlier). Even so, you are also assuming that the said site would block your usage unless you confirm your email.

Assuming one John Smith creates an account as john.smith@gmail.com ; and then another John Smith happens to create an account as johnsmith@gmail.com - and doesn't confirm the email right away (either the site doesn't ask for it; or doesn't really block any functionality - just keeps showing an annoying warning message). First John Smith can now easily take over the second account by triggering a forgot password workflow - for shit and giggles.

I agree! I have seen this happen to me years ago when Gmail debuted. But, this used to work - at least for Facebook. So, someone changed something at Facebook I guess - and decided to canonicalize the email. The other mystery of course is how the email set on my OG a/c just disappeared. It does not show up. Anyway, I will see what I can get done through official channels

P.S. I did start off with [Help HN] in the subject; but for some reason that was auto removed by HN. So `[Help HN] text` became just `text`. I eventually edited the subject to at least put in `Help` there.

@renewiltord Are you saying there is a "someone else has my address" flow for exactly this scenario? I didn't see anything remotely resembling it. Let me check again.

Not an issue. Thank you for your response.