Please Stop Verifying My Email Address
medium.com
medium.com
This turns out not to be the case.
I've just spent over 2 hours tracking someone down who had registered for a service, but provided an email address that bounced. This is a service that is delivered via email, so this just broke the whole thing.
By all means, don't verify email addresses by habit, but be aware that there are people who really will type their own email address incorrectly.
Added in edit: I have upvoted this, because anything that encourages implementors to improve the UI is to be encouraged. Too many developers seem to run on automatic ...
Those forms annoy me no end, if the mail is invalid you'll get a bounce and will (presumably) not consider me real. I'll not see the mail and will try again later.
I suspect most users copy/paste anyway.
Some forms disable the paste action in the second box to force you to type it again (to avoid copying an error).
This very problem accounts for the majority of support requests in case of those events (yes, more than 50% of all tickets is because the user entered incorrect information).
> I've found that users really are idiots
> when it comes to typing that in.
Some people just can't do it, and user interfaces that expect them to will lead repeatedly to unsustainable levels of error.
Your anecdote only serves to support this. You can't assume that 10% of the people are genuinely idiots. They are real people with skill sets that don't match yours.
There is a resilience in snail-mail that has no equivalent in email.
If I get the post code wrong but the rest of the address right, the letter will get through. If I make a typo in the name or address, the letter will get through.
If I make even the tiniest of typos in the email address, it'll fail.
Postal mail addressing doesn't permit any sort of feedback loop. The "user" has no indication at mailing time of any problems with the address. So it's no surprise that errors are common.
If you want email addresses to be correct, then you need that feedback loop, which means email verification.
You cant just say "dont ask me to verify", despite the good reason you've set out. Verifying your email is critical in some cases.
I run a company called Checkout 51. The end result of someone using our service is that we send them money. Its critical we have the correct email address for a range of reasons such as them trying to recover their password, support communications and simple account notifications (i.e. we've sent your cheque OR your account has been credited)
I would love to not verify peoples email addresses, but in some cases its important to do so in order to provide the best possible user experience.
The problem should be pretty obvious. They click the "I forgot my email" button so we generate a new password, send it to the email account they registered with and it bounces back. User emails, we try to do a search for it, find it and discover random slight misspellings such as .con.
With verification at least the user is aware that they didn't enter their email properly.
Additionally we send messages about rewards, ones that users would want to receive.
Our support staff can normally find the email using a %like% type search and correct it for the user, but without verification these users invest time in an account that they ultimately can lose access to without our assistance (not a good experience).
I would still say that tracking down a misspelled e-mail address or have the user completely confused at the next login (because they don't realise they misspelled it) might be worse than having the break in the registration process.
Perhaps a notification after a few days along the lines of "verify your email address is correct" top of the page in cases where it appears they haven't received your welcome email would be more appropriate. Rather than barricading them from using the service.
If only they would ALL send verification emails!!!!
If you don't do this, you'll have a lot more people marking your mail as spam, increasing your abuse score, and making it more likely that your legitimate mail will get filtered.
Source: http://mailchimp.com/resources/guides/how-to-avoid-spam-filt...
I'm surprised to see Mailchimp using the "double" term.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opt-in_email
"The term double opt-in has also been co-opted by spammers, diluting its value."
Since you can only send one email, it has to be the verification email.
You need to send the verification email at registration time, since users are likely to mistake it for spam if you send it at some arbitrary point later.
If, on the other hand, you have no need to send email at all, then there's no need to collect the address and thus no reason to verify it.
Later, your users will wonder why they're not receiving emails from you. If you send them out despite not having verification, then you've got the abuse problem again.
Abused (non-)users will just see every email as spam and ignore them, including the first welcome one. If you continue to send emails out, they will continue to be abused.
Just so people know why this has 7 points in quick succession, but is not on the front page:
To prove they control that email address, to ensure they didn't put it in wrong, and to protect poor bastards like myself with common email addresses from getting SPAMMED with mail for idiots who don't know their own email address.
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Seriously, as someone with a VeryCommonName@gmail.com -- I nearly everyday get dozens of emails from services that do not verify addresses. AT&T, Boost, Netflix, and many more.
At will I can reset these peoples passwords, delete accounts, upgrade/downgrade services, and do much more. There are too many for me to constantly deal with them, and the root cause is this idiotic authors recommendation.
What we need is the exact opposite, we need EVERYONE doing verification of email ownership before sending mail to that account -- else it is borderline spam and harassment.
I am in AWE of how spectacularly the author missed the point.
Another gripe I have is some of them don't even care whether or not you verify the address. I receive receipts and shipping status all the time.
You have to verify email addresses. There's no other way to recover passwords. And if your users value their specific account, then they need to be able to get into that account, even if they forget their password.
Perhaps this is not ideal for the service provider because then they cannot spam me but as this article points out I would just mark those emails as spam or filter in a modern inbox anyway.