[argee]

I have a question I wasn’t sure how to ask HN that is tangentially related to this. I’m the developer of an app where people can add other users to their workspaces, via email. The way this currently works is that your email gets added to the workspace and then when you log in with that email, you get access.

Now, this of course fails with “hide my email”. What’s the appropriate/standard way to handle this? Should I be using urls with invite codes instead of associating the email itself with access? I’m a little hesitant to do that since the code would have to persist in session and the business logic would have to occur on the login portal, since the mobile/desktop apps don’t share web cookies. Is deep linking the answer?

[layer8]

In general it's bad practice for a user to expose someone else's email address to an application provider without consent (email providers being the one necessary exeception, of course), therefore I would abandon that approach in any case.

You could implement read-only access to a workspace via a generated link (containing a UUID or similar), like e.g. a Dropbox link. You would store the link IDs with the workspace, and you can implement (user-configurable) link expiration and such. Since links are shareable, these wouldn't be personalized to the recipient. A recipient who wants more than read-only access would still have to create an account with you and ask the workspace owner for write access.

[argee]

> In general it's bad practice for a user to expose someone else's email address to an application provider without consent

Thanks, that makes sense as a rule of thumb. I'll move towards invite code (and work domain/SSO) based access. It's also a bit awkward to be able to add existing users to a workspace without any sort of confirmation, so my system needs a bit of rework regardless.

[WorldMaker]

I've seen this kind of thing fail in so many ways just as a user with a custom domain. Someone adds my real email (the custom domain) to a Google invite and my primary Google Account uses its own email (a Gmail account) that is in no way my primary email address and Google gets confused and won't let me access the thing sent to my real email because I'm trying to access it from my Google Account. (Plus additional variations where my custom domain was briefly hosted on what today is called Google Workspace and some things still seem to be misconfigured to point to shutdown accounts for my real primary address still apparently ghosts in Google Workspace.)

That's eternally a frustrating experience. It ranks among the reasons I groan every time someone asks if we can meet in Google Meeting instead of other options.

That's just dealing with one large giant of a company who you would think if anyone would have the software resources to truly untangle email addresses from account assumptions, they would have more than enough resources available.

Lots of little papercuts like that exist everywhere else. I have multiple accounts with various "Pledge Managers" because I gave Kickstarter a specific filtered address but still tend to respond to surveys and other things sent more directly to me with my primary email address. "For my convenience" most of these "Pledge Managers" tie their accounts to whatever email address they get from a Kickstarter export spreadsheet and then assume that each email address is 1:1 useful for marking an account as mine. It's often easier to juggle a bunch of reminder notes in my Password Manager which campaign is with which account with which "Pledge Manager" than to unify accounts. It becomes the opposite of convenience.

I've seen the same thing happen with + addresses, not just custom addresses at custom domain addresses. Add a + to a signup to get autofiltering when you sign up for a service and most services see `[e-mail]` as a different email address than `[e-mail]`. Which is the correct behavior because `+` filtering is a convention not a guarantee/standard. But it again adds complexity in these sorts of "auto-invites" when you are trying to auto-correlate based on specific email address.

It seems important to me to not assume that the address an invite is delivered to is the primary address for that person nor the intended address for their account with you. It may be useful to associate that delivered address automatically as a "secondary" address in some cases, but to insist that it be the primary on the account that results from the invite is a papercut friction for at least some of your potential users.

[argee]

I've already had to add code to "normalize" addresses with dots and plusses. That should've been my first sign to move to a different design.

[SAI_Peregrinus]

Not all providers tread dots and plusses the same. Gmail ignores dots (strips them out), and omits a plus and anything after it. Some providers include dots, so stripping them will be a different email address. Same for plusses and the content after them.

[Rumudiez]

email addresses are not good primary or foreign keys, so yes you should be using IDs of one form or another. this shouldn't affect your authentication scheme (cookies vs bearer tokens or what have you), just authorization. if you've muddied the two, you'll have some debt to resolve and this issue could just be a valuable tip-off to that

[HawtAds]

I think OP is referring to the initial sign up based on an invite link, not the database storage itself.

It depends whether you want to check the invite code against the invitee's email. It very much depends on the application. For most use cases, just verifying the code is fine and accept any email addresses that posses it.

Essentially ask yourself this, if you change the UI a bit and allow any user to sign up with any email, and the workspace joining is done via a code they enter after login, is that acceptable for your product design and security posture.

[Rumudiez]

okay, I have that use case as well and it is driven by an invite code. it works well for new sign-ups and existing users, and you can even just let the user copy the link and send it themselves if they're on discord or something else. no email required for pseudonymous sharing, bonus feature to send an email invite if it is given