Story:
Many services require a combination of email address and password to log in. In that case the email address acts as user name. However email addresses are prone to spam and abuse. If each service has it’s own mail address, the cause could be identified more easily and one could drop a mail address which attracted spam. Users which have their own domain name could easily implement that and maybe later it would be possible to provide other users with a free service for that as well (e.g. each user can create a mail domain like @michael.bitwardenmail.org).
Features:
The user can generate user names using a recipe
Parts of that mail address can be generated from a dictionary. E.g. generating a mail address like [email protected] should be possible
Some sites require a user name and a mail address. Bitwarden logins may need an additional field for that.
I know most people use the same username for all or most accounts created online. It would be more secure to have a different username for every account just like we have different passwords. I think this would make it way harder on hackers if they ever get their hands on an account. I’m guilty of having every single account I own with the same username. I know this might be disliked by some but from a privacy and security standpoint it would benefit us users.
What do you think of just using the password generator for the username as well? What would be the benefit of a separate username generator? There are only so many short and readable usernames to pick from. So you would end up with something like the passphrase generator anyway.
The only issue I see is that MANY major websites (utilities, ISPs, etc…) require either an email address or phone number as “username”. Of course you could enter a bogus email address as your username but it would have to employ a format recognized as an email.
e.g. - [email protected] and then vary it accordingly that way. A thought!
I agree with everything you’re saying. For email stuff like that I use something called burner email. It creates random disposable emails that will forward everything to the email of your choice. The only reason I brought this up is because I looked at the feature on NordPass and it seemed interesting but I don’t know about the implementation.
Many email services support adding a - or + to the address, and then whatever words you want can follow it. e.g. [email protected] would get sent to [email protected]. The advantage of this, is that if that account gets compromised, and the email address gets on to a list for spammers, presumably most of them aren’t going to process out the extension right now, so after learning about the compromise or getting spam mail sent to that address extension, it could be blocked.
Aside from something to generate email extensions, even having a memory to suggest your default username or email address when creating accounts would be cool.
In the case of random usernames, if someone wanted that functionality, I think it would be preferable to draw on lists of sensible words, or allow the user to specify a base username or wordlist, from which something would be randomly generated.
Also if your password generator is set to use just alphanumeric items (or whatever bounds your username may require), you can use CTRL/CMD + Shift + 9 to copy a generated string to your clipboard, and just paste it into the username field
