[capevace]

Magic links can be very helpful when needing to authorise people from an external system without API access, and they recently saved our asses from having to process over 10.000 refunds manually. Let me explain:

I work as a web dev for my local students union, and we recently had to develop a system to process refunds for basically every student there (9€ ticket related).

However, our university wanted nothing to do with that process, so we couldn’t use existing student login infrastructure to verify refund claims and limit them to one per student.

Luckily, each student gets a @stud.leuphana.de mail address. So all we had to do was send them a login link – if you weren’t a student or entered an invalid address you simply never received that, so you couldn’t apply.

The system worked great and with few issues, thanks to magic links!