I like this idea of reverse email verification. I have a gmail account that I have long since abandoned due to other people signing up for accounts and using my address. If they actually had to send an email from the address to sign up then I probably wouldn't have abandoned my address as quickly.
Why don’t we do email verification in reverse?
211–220 of 329 posts
Re: Why don’t we do email verification in reverse?
#212Re: Why don’t we do email verification in reverse?
#213I will rant here a bit. I say: let them experiment. Let this guy implement his clever scheme and see how spam bots population increases several folds and conversion drops 10-15%. If he knows what conversion is and have a metrics for it. And knows what metrics are, also. And if spammers are interested at all in his product. Or whatever. Also let the legion of newbies and dilettantes vote articles like this to the moon…
Why so extremely aggressive?
Re: Why don’t we do email verification in reverse?
#214mailto:links for most people just open up some associated email client which they never used before and which isn’t associated with their email account (which they check via a web page like gmail).
So mailto: is a non starter. A standard that just doesn’t do what a developer might think it does.
Re: Why don’t we do email verification in reverse?
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
Magic Links mean that if there is any issue with any of the email servers in the chain (which there often are), my ability to log in to the website may be delayed by 10, 20, maybe even 30 minutes. It’s unacceptable and everyone I know who uses magic link has eventually given up on them due to user unfamiliarity and a variety of issues such as this one.
> Magic Links mean that if there is any issue with any of the email servers in the chain (which there often are), my ability to log in to the website may be delayed by 10, 20, maybe even 30 minutes. This same exact thing happens with a username and password driven site because almost all sites (rightfully) require you to confirm your account after sign up by clicking a link in your email.
With magic links it happens every single login. Confirmation email only needs to be done once per email. I thought this was obvious?
And most websites don’t require confirmation email to log in, they require it to unlock certain features.
Re: Why don’t we do email verification in reverse?
#216Why we do email verification ? Is a burocratic vestige no one need or asked for.
Thanks to a certain person named "Sam" in Florida I know that the following companies do not do email verification (and do not have an automated way to fix it with a "I did not sign up with this address" link):
Domino's Pizza; Tinder (they at least sent a verification email, but it was a smokescreen); Match.com; Pinterest; Judicial Watch, Inc.; Straight Talk Wireless; Wayfair; Kellogg's
and many many more.
People sign up with other people's email addresses all the time. In error, or on purpose.
Re: Why don’t we do email verification in reverse?
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hate the email login link stuff, and any site that has it as the only option, I move on unless absolutely forced to use it. Especially a pain if I'm trying to login on a device without my email.
You don't need to have email on the device you are logging in from Can take out phone and click link
Some of the ones that doesn’t work - it logs you in on your phone but not the computer you were trying to login on
Re: Why don’t we do email verification in reverse?
#218I'm late to the party but I think we cannot let the client know the secret token
Re: Why don’t we do email verification in reverse?
#219Why do we even need email verification? I don't want to allow a website to link my identity to my email address or phone number. I don't want the website to push me messages. I am capable of storing passwords, so no need to send me password recovery emails. Email verification should be optional.
Because services don't want to be spammed with fake accounts.
Reddit, Instagram and Twitter all require emails, and they're some of the most spamful services I have seen. HN requires nothing but a unique name and associated password, and if there's a lot of bots here then I guess they're running really sophisticated NLP.
Now of course, HN is more domain specific and niche than other socials so I know it's a bit unfair to compare spam because of course spammers would be more interested in the more populous and general purpose social media, and it's possible that spam and bots on those other services would be even higher if not for email registration, but there's simply no data to support that : email registration is cargo-culted by any remotely user-oriented service without thinking if it fits.
And there is a very good reason to think that email registration is just a dumb lazy hack to delegate problems instead of solving them : come to think of it, email fights spam! How do they do it, by delegating to another email service? Email registration all the way down? Of course not, they just run a bunch of really simple stats on the text to reject the obvious 99% trash. Are reddit and twitter too poor to pay for markov chains running on every text submitted?
Re: Why don’t we do email verification in reverse?
#220I think that complexity is the #1 problem here. This is a clever way to confirm user emails, but it's also inviting additional universes of bugs and confusion to the party.
For me the answer is a simple question:
Would the author (or anyone here) be happy to support the proposed reverse email verification process in a production environment which interfaces with the general public? For the sake of forcing the argument, assume the service being accessed is Really Important and failure is generally unacceptable.