why must e-mail addresses be unique?

[Migrated From Jforum.net]

Hi, I'm looking at migrating an existing board to JForum. One issue is, our existing users can have multiple accounts with the same e-mail address. I see this is not allowed in JForum, and I'm trying to understand why. I've looked at the source code somewhat, and I see that GenericUserDAO.findByEmail() returns a single user. I can modify this to return a List easily enough, but I'm trying to understand the use of this method and the consequences of changing it. It's called by POPPostAction.findUsers(), which is called by POPPostAction.insertMessages() which is called by POPListener.execute() - a job scheduled in Quartz. OK. But I'm not getting a sense of what these messages are for, or why it's (currently) necessary that there be only one user per e-mail address. Am I asking for trouble if I change this to allow multiple users per e-mail? Any insight would be appreciated. Thanks...


[originally posted on jforum.net by jryingst]

[Migrated From Jforum.net]

Perhaps this should have been in Questions, since this isn't (to my knowledge) something being actively worked on for mainstream JForum; it's something I'm trying to customize for our version. Though it seems like a new feature that others could use, if it can work. If a moderator could move this to the appropriate forum, that would be appreciated.
[originally posted on jforum.net by jryingst]