Please confirm your email address | Hacker News Reader

Please confirm your email address

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422 pointshuhtenberg79 comments

Using the imperative wording "please confirm" suggests the recipient must take an action, rather than passively receive information. This reminds me of a Mac OS X Human Interface Guideline:

"Use a verb or verb phrase for the title of a push button. The title you create should describe the action the button performs—Save, Close, Print, Delete, Change Password, and so on."

http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/UserEx...

The difference between "Email confirmation" and "Please confirm your email" is like that between "Ok" and "Save."

These are the types of stories I like to see on the front page of HN.

To +1 a comment, click the upward triangle next to the commenters name.

I am not sure if you are being sarcastic or not, given that um3shg gets downvoted for saying "+1" while MatthewPhillips gets upvoted for doing the same, just with more text.

If everybody just hit the submit button without putting some effort into the textarea, this outstanding news site would be much like every other one.

"Just with more text" is too simplistic.

Isn't this just obvious though?

Possibly, but like many things that are "obvious" they seem not to happen as often as you'd think they should.

In hindsight. The problem is often that we as programmers name things after what we use it for internally, or where we want to end up. Ie, we want an email conformation, but the customer that has to send it, so please do.

Yes but.

Imagine yourself as a user of this service. You sign up, get the "email confirmation", think everything is good. A day later you notice that it isn't working, check up, actually read the email and click the link.

Now you want to report a bug. What do you say? How do you explain that you got it to work, but it could have worked better? When there's a large helpdesk, this kind of feedback is nearly impossible to give in any meaningful way. Even if you could speak to the coders concerned, often it's hard to get them to think in a different way and see the problem.

So it's obvious but it's hard.

There are a ton of things that are obvious once you think of them.

Lots of things are obvious in retrospect or when pointed out but opaque before then.

And some things are obvious to you and amazing to others http://sivers.org/obvious

Indeed, but in this case I wish I could upvote it without saving it.

That's my post there. It'd be very interesting to compare email confirmation rates. I am running on a private mail server that is configured according to all possible spam filtering guidelines and yet I am still at only 82%. I wonder if these 18% is just people overwhelmed with emails in their Inbox or if there's still some issues with being mis-categorized as a spam.

Anyone else cares to share their numbers?

No scientific data here, but it sounds to me that 82% is pretty damn good. You'll never reach 100% because there'll always be folks who sign up and then simply don't follow thru. I know I'm guilty of that. It's like handing out Broadway show flyers... just because I take one doesn't mean I'm going to actually buy tickets to see the show.

If you are looking for confirmations... perhaps a percentage just didn't use valid emails? Possibly accidentally?

Yep, there are dupes and there are mistyped addresses. But plenty of unconfirmed @gmail.com (about 50%) as well as addresses personal servers (on judging by the domain names).

Are you tracking emails that bounce? Or people that have whitelists of who can email them? Then there's the people who always send signups to a special yahoo signup address they rarely check. You can probably do a little better than 82%, but I doubt you'll ever beat 95%.

What's the best wording for email body with confirmation link?

Currently I use:

====

Please open this link to confirm your email:

http://www.postjobfree.com/a.aspx?k=c3d26a0fc5d145cf88898a92...

This link will expire on: 8/19/2011 10:29:11 PM EST.

====

Thanks for the tip about subject for email confirmation!

In the past I was using "Link to confirm your PostJobFree email", but your new version with clear call to action ("Please confirm your email address") should perform better.

You should drop the bit about the expiration. It requires someone to do a timezone calculation to even figure out what it means, and you probably want them to click the link even if it has expired, then you can give a proper support message with what they need to do.

Agreed on the formatting, but I bet that having that expiration date on there increases the CTR.

Please spell out the month name. In many countries dates are formatted as DD.MM.YYYY rather than MM/DD/YYYY. For example, a native German speaker will have a lot of trouble recognizing that date. Especially if it is something like 8/7/2011 (is that August 7 or July 8?)

If you write the date as "August 8, 2011" it should be trivial to parse for everyone. (Except for people using different calendars)

Not only native Germans, other native English speakers, like people in the UK use the DD/MM/YY format. Unlike people from Germany, people from the UK have no language barrier, and are a potential customer.

Yes, you are totally right. But don't overrate the language barrier: I sell a software product that is English only (localization is too expensive), and the majority of my customers are from non-English-speaking markets.

I think it would be even more user friendly if you included a more readable expiration. Something like "this link will expire in 2 days (8/19/2011 10:29:11 PM EST)". This gives the user a more understandable deadline, without having to check the current date

Surely you don't need expiry to be accurate to the second. Also, most people in the world have no idea where "EST" is (or even what it means).

Why not just say "The link is valid until August 19", and then let it expire some time after all the world has moved on to the 20th? (No MM/DD or DD/MM. Please.)

I personally prefer the old fashioned "Just reply to this mail" method, which many mailing lists use for confirmation, to opening a browser window - in the worst case I have to wait for my browser to launch, too - and I'm going to close that window immediately anyway so I can get back to what I was actually doing, so I just think "I'll get to that later", but then I don't, and when I remember [did I click that link? I'm pretty sure I did, so there's probably a bug in their list somewhere and I shall ignore them henceforth], the link has probably expired anyway [can't be bothered checking what time and day it is in "EST" (Estonia?)] so I'll just browse around for funny kittens instead. And all of that just because somebody wanted me to click on a link. They're sooo cute!

Maybe that's just me, but everytime I see a "just reply to this email", I stop and wonder about the details. Do I have to put something more in the body ? Will my mail go through ? Is it automated, or will a real person on the other side process my answer ?

Maybe it's just that the email way is too rarely used, but it makes me pause. I prefer a link, that's much more of a no-brainer.

Why would you browse for what EST mean if you can simply open confirmation link and see if it works?

But the suggestions overall are valid - thanks!

What's better:

1) "The link will expire 2011 August 19"

2) "The link is valid until 2011 August 19"

3) "The link is valid for one day until 2011 August 19"?

"valid through August 19"

Right. "Through" is better than "until" because "until" leaves the reader unsure whether it includes August 19th. And 2011 is unnecessary; if someone does find an old message, they can look at the Date: header.

Personally, I would say "August 19th", not "19".

I've always found "through" to be confusing when used like this. It's like the whole "Next Friday" thing - is that the one about to happen (it's the "next" one to occur), or is it the one after that? (in Australia, it's usually the later) I much prefer "valid until August 19"

(I'm a native English speaker, not from the US where "through" seems more common)

Agreed, especially with the dropped year.

If the duration is less than three months, the year can be inferred from the date of the email.

"The link will expire after August 19"

This gives people a sense of urgency, but doesn't discourage them from trying the link if they're a little late. "Through" is (to my ears) an Americanism.

Exactly, and only, what this is: a subject with a clear call to action instead of a subject that seems to indicate that this email was generated as an auto-response to a previous action and contained a body that did not require user interaction.

What about:

Next Step: Confirm your email address

Thinking along the lines of how "Follow me on Twitter" tests better than "If you liked this blog entry, please follow me on Twitter." Just give people a direct order. "Next step" might make it clearer that they're not yet finished with the process?

Interesting idea. Having said that, "Next Step" makes it sounds like a longer process. It doesn't seem like I won't be quite done after this.

I think rewarding the user for singing up would be an interesting incentive. "Click the link to receive your first email".

Having said that, unlike registration confirmations, where I would like to get back out of my inbox to your site. For mailing lists, I don't need to go back to your site, really. I'd much rather stay in my inbox if that's ok. I'd quite like to see an A/B test between the usual method and a request for people reply to the email, rather than click a link. "Reply to this email to start receiving updates": simple order, direct resulting action. It also makes it sound like a similar action will be required to stop receiving updates.

True. What about: "Final step: ..." or "Confirm your subscription to receive your first issue"?

Wonder how many people are using web-based mail clients and whether that would impact a preference to reply or click?

"Awaiting email confirmation"

I am consistently running around 75%, with subject line "Confirm your email address". I am going to change it to "Please confirm your email address".

I send the confirmation emails through Google's email servers (Google Apps).

update: If I break it down by domain, I see gmail->80%, yahoo->70%, and hotmail->66%.

You should be able to get to 95%. On the form there is no indication that an action is required after entering my email address. I also see a generic "support" as the sender in gmail.

Go, click on that link already. You are skewing my beautiful stats :)

Good point regarding the sender name. I will play with it once HN wave subsides.

Does simply seeing 82% vs. 50% enough? Shouldn't there be some significance measurements added to it? If you had only 6 people in this experiment maybe it is just a statistical error...

If there were 6 people, he wouldn't be saying 82%. 83%, maybe.

Are you going to email old subscribers (who didn't confirm) a reminder with the new subject line?

Ha. That's a nice idea. Let me see if it works :)

We had a cool thing. We let the user use our site once, but to "activate their account" and set up a password, they had to click the link in their email. Otherwise they would be reminded next time they tried to sign in (without a password)

It gave people an incentive to verify their email!

Check out blurts.com and qbix.com for examples

I remember a talk by Terry Chay in which he showed that adding a smiley to the subject (don't remember the project) dramatically increased the response.

Little details can make such a big difference.

This is surprising to me. I would expect that I would more easily mis-categorize such an email as spam (than the one without a smiley).

For AnyNewBooks.com I have the following thank you page: http://anynewbooks.com/thank-you/

And the email I send has the subject: "Please confirm your subscription"

Between the two, the message is fairly clear. Yet, I still receive emails from novice users once in a while, who aren't familiar with the concept of "confirming" a subscription. Usability isn't easy.

Not to detract from your nice design, but wouldn't something like this be more effective?

http://i.imgur.com/d98aC.jpg

That is, downsized screenshot, with graphics drawn on top. I think the original looks too much like a real window.

It might be interesting to add a click event on the link in the image and track how many people actually "click here" on the image of an inbox.

Maybe even have a popup that triggers if that link is clicked that says something like: "Sorry, this is just a screenshot. Please check your email inbox for this message"

Nor will it ever be perfect. No matter how friendly you make it, there will always be people who deftly dodge every piece of helpful info or design you throw at them.

We use the Devise gem https://github.com/plataformatec/devise and the default subject line is: "Confirmation instructions". I can't say anyone on our team thought to change it. Good clear language like "Please confirm your email address" would be great to have as the default in gems like devise

I think it totally depends on your subscriber base, but with Hacker Newsletter I've seen about a 95% success rate. I have always used the default MailChimp subject which is "Hacker Newsletter List: Please Confirm Subscription".

I use usertesting.com. You get a ten minute video and audio of testers using your site. These types of small (aka big) problems are weeded out pretty quickly.

Can't rate them high enough.

This always bothered me about SEOmoz's new public analytics button on all their blog updates.

The button says "Post Analytics". That makes me think "send analytic to SEOmoz". But what they really mean is "view this blog post's analytics".

This is good. I wish more people would talk about email praxis because it seems like voodoo a lot of the time.

Do we even really need to confirm email addresses?

Yes, at least in Germany, you have to show that the user confirmed their email, or risk a cease and desist when you mail them otherwise. Some lawyers send those for fun and profit.

You might also consider adding a web bug image to your confirmation email. If the user loads the confirmation email's HTML, you know it is a real email address even if they don't click the confirmation link.

Admittedly, it might be someone ELSE'S email address, but they could manually unsubscribe from your mailing list later.

Using image links 'calling back home' isn't reliable, because email clients have options to prevent such images from being shown automatically, especially if those emails might be considered spam.

Considering Outlook and Gmail block them by default, it's extremely unreliable

In this case though, it shouldn't hard confirmations, a possibly increase them a little. Unless people choose not to confim because they get a "images have been blocked" message.

It will also give better data - you can see of the people who opened the email and displayed images, what percent actually clicked the link.

Admittedly, it might be someone ELSE'S email address, but they could manually unsubscribe from your mailing list later.

That's half the point of verifying e-mail addresses. Doing this is likely to engender significant ill-will in anyone who is an unintended recipient of your e-mails.

I have a different view. I hate having to confirm my email address when I signup for a mailing list. It's more annoying to confirm my email address 50 times, versus the 1 time I have to unsubscribe from a list that someone signed me up for by accidentally entering my email address.

I am actually considering not sending a confirmation email. Every maillist message already includes an immediate unsubscribe list, and I thought perhaps to add a small note at the bottom of subscriber's first email, something like

  ---

  You are receiving this email because someone (presumably you) 
  subscribed $(email) to the $(maillist-name). Subscription 
  request was received from a network address of $(ip) on $(date).

  If you did not request this subscription, or would like to be
  removed from the maillist for another reason, visit this link
  to unsubscribe - $(link).

A bit of a mouthful, but essentially this simply piggy-backs the confirmation request on an actual mailing list message. Thoughts?

It's better to use double-opt-in:

1) Enter email on web page.

2) Open confirmation link in email inbox.

If you skip second step - there is a risk that email ends up in spam folder and is constantly delivered there. Another risk - user did not really request your subscription. That would often result in your emails being marked as spam.

Yeah, I guess the biggest issue is someone plugging in john@acmecorp.com just to test the subscription form, and then actual John getting a maillist message and tagging it as a spam. The question here is if the same John would or would not tag a plain confirmation message as spam too, and I suspect that he would, in which case what I wrote above is no worse than a double-opt-in in edge cases.

Except that you continue to waste the resources of both acmecorp and yourself by sending mail that no one ever sees.

Woah... why am I at -1? A knee-jerk reaction of some sort?

What happens when you need to communicate sensitive information with a customer?

Ignoring for a moment the ethical question of if its OK to trade your convenience as a person benefiting from the transaction for an uninvolved person's:

1. Before the near-universal requirement for confirmed opt in, it was a reasonably common attack/prank to sign up someone else for tons of lists, causing them to receive unmanageable amounts of email per day. Alternatively, sign them up for lists they'd consider offensive, or that'd get them in trouble at work. Confirmed opt-in stopped this attack.

2. We've (computer geeks, security experts, etc.) spent years trying to teach users that no, they really shouldn't click on that link in an unexpected email, even if it promises cute kittens. That continues to be a problem. I don't know how an expert, much less random Joe, could tell a real "click here to unsubscribe" link from a fake one, if you have no idea who the sender is. Researching if its a legitimate unsubscribe link—and not a link that'll confirm to a spammer that you're reading his email, or pull up a page full of the latest browser or Flash exploits, makes it far more expensive for the random person to handle an opt-out than it is for the person who wants the subscription to handle a confirm.

Confirm emails are easy for a random person to handle: just ignore them. You won't receive any more emails if you take no action.

3. Not all email addresses are nearly-free to send to. Well, they're all nearly free for the sender, but not the recipient. Some email addresses cost 20¢ per message (e.g., SMS gateway). Some email addresses page people, waking them at night. These addresses aren't always very different from other people's addresses (I've personally had misdirected mail to both types). Someone can also do this as an attack. Sending a single message is bad enough, but is the minimal harm you can do; but imagine if anyone could subscribe your text message address or pager number to linux-kernel.

4. Realistically, while some mailing lists are very easy to get off of (e.g., development list for a random open source project), many commercial lists aren't. I've had people give my email address (assumably by mistake) to the College Board on their PSAT (hundreds of emails per month, many from different senders, no way at all to stop them); sign me up for an Xbox account (took me at least half an hour to figure out how to stop that—-apparently you're supposed to phone Microsoft; thankfully I finally found another way); sign me up for various things at EA (nothing on their web site, contacting support was absolutely useless); etc.

5. Your ISP probably has policies against sending unsolicited bulk and/or commercial email. If you aren't confirming your subscriptions, you can expect your ISP to receive complaints, and you are probably in violation of their TOS.

Is it reasonable to flag (and send a complaint to the ISP) anything without an obvious "unsubscribe" link as spam?

No. Spammers include unsubscribe links, too; they just don't obey them.

Even worse than not obey them, they've been known to treat them as confirmation that their spam is being read, and send more spam in response. Or sell the email address to other spammers as a confirmed-good address. It used to actually cost money to spam (but nowhere near as much as it cost the recipients).

Not sure how much this still happens, with spam being so much cheaper to send with botnets.

For one, I don't know of any client that still loads remote images without confirmation, much less 1x1 tracking images.

Secondly, if I can sign someone else up without their knowledge and get you to send then unsolicited mail, you're risking legal problems.

78 comments so far, and not one mention of technical writing. I have to admit that I almost never hear about hiring or contracting with tech writers in early-stage startups. But it might be a worthwhile idea.

I'm a tech writer, and I hope that not too much self-advertising for my first post here.

I bet the one with the title "Email confirmation" was going to spam folders ... I've seen a lot of spam with that exact title when I'm cleaning out my gmail spam folder

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