- Password Recovery (this can be optional though, for my sites it usually is)
- 'Legit Users', sending an email and having them confirmed through a code in them gives a bit more confidence in the user
There isn't a day that goes by that I don't get an email intended for someone else, often including personal information, due to a mistyped email address. Whoever decided that email verification was a poor user experience needs to be hit in the head with a shovel after he digs the appropriate sized hole.
If you know Catherin (PA) let her know her round trip to vegas is confirmed
Carolyn's (NYC) open table reservation was canceled by the restaurant.
Different Carolyn (CA) needs to correct email address with the walnut creak school district.
Possible the same Catherine (PA), your financial advisor needs a distribution form filled out.
Clint (OH), your repair at Kay jewelers in Akron is done.
Ann (FL), Thank you for scheduling an online appointment with Conley Subaru
sigh, you get the idea
Edit: Oh, and I'm going to start canceling Open Table reservations that show up in my inbox.
My most entertaining email yet was a group thread that kept track of a young missionary's progress as he traveled through South America. He's home now, so I don't get weekly updates anymore :( I almost miss it.
That's a solid argument for business cards with vCard QR codes as I see it. Or a pack of stickers with QR codes that you could slap on whatever documents you needed.
It's too bad QR code adoption is so horrible. I'm just as guilty of it as anyone else, I assume that any QR code is probably just some marketing thing.
But vCards seem like one of the very legit use-cases. Now that I am imagining using stickers and never filling out my contact info on a form again, I realize that's definitely a world I want to live in.
I think it's more likely if you use an initial in your email address. I have a fairly unusual last name, but I used my first initial to create my gmail address, so I regularly get stuff meant for a couple of other people.
Business cards or sheets of stickers are not going to solve this problem. The former is not universal, and you're not going to get enough adoption for the latter (do you really want to carry them around in case you need to put your email on a form?).
The only solution that might actually work is to put some kind of financial penalty on certain classes of email sender to incentivize reasonable levels of validation.
Yes. Or my name/address/phone number. It's essentially a machine-readable address label, the email is just one part of the vCard.
Do you people really not keep a book of stamps in your car? Such inconvenience!
> Do you people really not keep a book of stamps in your car?
No, why would I do that?
What I really wish for is a link in emails that say "I am not the intended recipient of this letter." Normal mail works like that. You can ask the United States Postal Service to only deliver mail that has your name on it, and if you send back mail with someone else's name they will add that person's name to a database that says the mail is undeliverable.
I don't want to mark these organizations as spam, but that's basically what they are to me. I've started using the password reset to log in and change the email preferences so I don't get these emails anymore.
Plus, this individual who keeps signing me up lives in Australia. I cannot imagine our system is so dysfunctional that both the United States and Australia would agree that a) this is a criminal offense, and that b) it would be worth going through the effort of extraditing me to face justice.
I mean, I haven't even received another password reset request from those websites I logged in to fix that issue, so I half imagine that person is using my email address as a plausible address for email they don't care about.
I understand what you mean, but I don't think I'm going to have to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder. The few personal emails I've gotten with financial details (gym membership bills, etc) I've responded letting them know about the mix-up and they've been more than happy to fix the issue. Feel free to say I told you so when I end up in a jail full of kangaroos though.
I even tried calling Apple to get them to cancel the account, but they wouldn't let me because I couldn't answer any of the security questions on the account!
The guy on the phone acknowledged that of course I can't answer them, because I didn't create them, bit their policy forbids them from doing anything without the security questions...
Quick Edit: I just read the Wikipedia page, and individuals cannot bring suit against spammers (using CAN-SPAM in any case). Which is a shame really, because spam is really really annoying.
I found this out the hard way when someone else had created an account under my email address and because some of my friends had uploaded their address book, my friends were following this stranger, perhaps thinking it was me. When I eventually did choose to sign up, I had to jump through a bunch of hoops just to be able to use my own email address.
My last name is pretty uncommon, but there are at least a thousand of us or so in the US.
I probably get a dozen emails a month to people who are not me (not counting all the ones that end up in the spam folder after I'm on a damn list).
Susan. Stephen. Another Sam. So many damn S. Lastnames around.
On occasion I've tracked the people down. I've forwarded their emails if they seem important. And whenever I ask that they be more careful and memorize their own email address, they get defensive and tell me someone else made a mistake.
Buddy, this email was was an automated response from a computer after you signed up for something. No, it did not just randomly decide to send to my @gmail instead of your actual @yahoo address. YOU just don't know your own email.
If we didn't have a monoculture in email providing, this would be far less of an issue.
"Hi X. The £80 million for the new biomedical building is approved, please make the transfer ASAP."
It turned out I had the same unusual name as the most senior financial officer.
That's why you get send the verification email first, when creating the application user, and don't do anything until the email is verified.
The flow should be:
User: Please give me an account; my email address is jim@example.invalid
Server: I have sent an email to jim@example.invalid
Server → jim@example.invalid: Please go to https://server.invalid/register?token=KDU6dG9rZW4xOWppbUBleG...
User: visits URL, completes registration
Not to the extent of the above, but for instance, last year I received someone's job offer in Colorado. I did respond to the sender to let them know of the mistake of course.