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If it matters, you can make it non-trivial. As with most privacy attacks, you can target an individual pretty easily.

But, if you're trolling for lots of users, the "new account" feature will have a much lower operational tempo than the authentication workflow, and for a privacy conscious organization, you can do things to make it harder for attackers. Examples: Captcha, data input validation, risk scoring, don't provide immediate confirmation, etc.

Revealing that the email address is a valid system account isn't a particularly useful piece of information to a user who isn't remembering a password. john.smith100000@gmail.com is probably taken by another John Smith. It just isn't a useful piece of information.



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