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Why don’t we do email verification in reverse?

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Re: Why don’t we do email verification in reverse?

#291
post #246
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's about both parties having agreed _at least once_ on a way for the service to communicate important stuff to you. Exactly. And the most important thing is password reset, because users forgetting passwords is the one true constant in the universe. Even if I'm not planning to spam you with newsletter crap, I'm still going to ask for your email just for this reason, otherwise I will get inf support tickets about…

With this method, it seems to me the entire user registration information would be in your Sent folder. So forgetting the password should be more difficult. Though you would still need to reset a password.

[deleted]

Re: Why don’t we do email verification in reverse?

#292

Ignoring every other benefit and concern, verification in the way proposed is a bad idea because part of the verification process in most cases is verifying that the service can send messages to you that actually get delivered. If you do this and then send the first "log in link" email which gets held up as spam or putatively malicious since some server has the temerity to not be located inside the US, doesn't have a…

In most cases, I don’t want the service to send me emails (spam)

Re: Why don’t we do email verification in reverse?

#293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately even privileged users (that have authority to change the permissions or possibly passwords of other users) can still use weak passwords. A better solution would be to have your browser prevent you from reusing passwords (it only needs to keep hashes).

If the web browser is governing the passwords you can and can't have, and forcing you to have unmemorisable passwords, you're better off rethinking the whole thing. For instance, it probably makes more sense to ask the web browser to generate keypairs rather than passwords if we know the passwords cannot possibly be memorised.

I don't reuse passwords, or use a password manager. I just have a system for remembering which password to use for each website, and maintain a list of hints. And I have a pretty terrible memory. But having had the password I used to re-use across a few (non- critical) sites show up on haveibeenpwned it's what works best for me.

Re: Why don’t we do email verification in reverse?

#294

Ignoring every other benefit and concern, verification in the way proposed is a bad idea because part of the verification process in most cases is verifying that the service can send messages to you that actually get delivered. If you do this and then send the first "log in link" email which gets held up as spam or putatively malicious since some server has the temerity to not be located inside the US, doesn't have a…

In most cases, I don’t want the service to send me emails (spam)

That's fair but in a lot of cases you verify the email for your account and there is activity associated with that account. There are many reasons other than to send unwanted marketing emails for the service to need to get in touch with you, including the many cases where you're entering the email address because you want to be notified of something.

Re: Why don’t we do email verification in reverse?

#295
I’ve had similar issues of not receiving emails before and it’s annoying especially if you’re trying to do password resets.

I like the idea the author is taking about although I’m not too techie with all the details.

If I tried this “reverse” approach I would do it this way,

After the user creates their account, simply generate a unique token and tell the user to simply copy the token and send it back to a specific email address controlled by me with the token as the subject line and the body is ignored.

This way the user sends the unique code from the email address they want to use so we know it’s them cause how else would they get the unique token.

Is it 100% fool-proof? No. But most things humans touch is not secured 100% anyways but I’d like to think it’s a start.

Re: Why don’t we do email verification in reverse?

#296
post #94
post #5

A general rule of thumb I've built up over the years: resist the temptation to innovate around login! Look at the most commonly used flows that are not obviously terrible and try to implement as close a match to them as possible. When I've tried to innovate around login in the past I've found that any clever ideas I come up with inevitably run into road blocks pretty quickly. Here's one example: why have a separate l…

Super typical developer thinking :) two pieces of code look the same but are not doing the same things. I usually see it when people implement add/edit for some entity, that should be separate forms but are crammed into one to be "DRY".

This is why views are so nice. You can reuse the view and controller logic and only write a new data model that updates instead of creates (tbh though those can just be two functions on some data model.)

Re: Why don’t we do email verification in reverse?

#297
post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could consider setting up a separate email account just for the verification messages and have that on your phone.

can you name even one service that uses login links and allows you to configure an address that is exclusively used for login links and not any other communication? i'm not talking about unselecting all other types of communication, but rather having the service store 2 different emails for you. one for logging in and one for communication.

That is a fair point, indeed this would probably make the configuration page extremely complex. I guess my suggestion would only work for cases where you don’t really care much about other kinds of notifications.

Re: Why don’t we do email verification in reverse?

#298
post #287
post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if you or the user refuse to use federated auth. And even then do you not have 2FA? Then your 2FA is reduced to 1FA by email? "There is no way around it" is such b.s., yes there is, pretend email does not exist, how would you do it? I think you skipped over parts of my post, there is a myriad of messaging applications if you insist control over some external account is the way to go. But really, the ideal way to…

Email can replace only the password, leaving you with 2FA still. Another messaging channel is fine of course. You could replace email address by a phone number for SMS/WhatsApp/Signal. Is that more secure though? Would a user rather give your random app their phone number than email address? Secret questions are usually very much not secret (less safe than password). They are way easier to uncover about a person, and…

> Another messaging channel is fine of course. You could replace email address by a phone number for SMS/WhatsApp/Signal. Is that more secure though? Would a user rather give your random app their phone number than email address?

Yes! Even insecure SMS is more secure than email. You know why? Because everybody and their mother is logging and inspecting email, I see people's reset codes and links all the time to everything from banks to porn sites! Many messaging systems including sms have no "account" to get phished either so while other attack vectors like malware infection remain (as with email), credential phishing as an attack vector is eliminated when using these messaging apps. Yes, many people in non-US countries use whatsapp,wechat,facebook or viber but don't even have an email until some retarded app forces them to get one just for the retarded registration system (in some, "internet access" even costs more with just FB,viber,whatsapp being the cheap default). Many gen-Z'ers also use messaging apps over email, it's like asking them to use aol or icq! And it is very convenient to block unwanted senders on those apps if you decide to sell their contact info or spam them with email (where with email it varies greatly with email client and provider). If you go by the numbers the majority of internet users are coerced into using email because people who design apps stuck in the 2000s.

> Secret questions are usually very much not secret (less safe than password). They are way easier to uncover about a person, and still very much subject to re-use across sites.

Depends a lot on how you implement them, again if you read my comment before replying I suggest pictures,emoji and patterns, you can ask them just about anything so long as it isn't information about them others can also learn easily. It is no different than passwords themselves being reused across sites, except here you control what easy to remember questions and answers to ask like "what are your too three emoji from this list" or "create a passphrase from a combination of these common words below", again, not a difficult problem unless in 2022 your assumption is there are many internet users incapable of remembering anything more than their mothers maiden name (who even knows that shit?) or whatever in which case there are plenty of other ways to provide challenges.

> I am telling you that I haven't found anything as good and you reply that I must not have taken a single minute to think about it. I guess there's nothing more for us to discuss.

You literally ignored the possibilities I listed, if you are disagreeing with my comment in ignorance of what I said then yes, let's not waste our time here.

Re: Why don’t we do email verification in reverse?

#299
post #5

A general rule of thumb I've built up over the years: resist the temptation to innovate around login! Look at the most commonly used flows that are not obviously terrible and try to implement as close a match to them as possible. When I've tried to innovate around login in the past I've found that any clever ideas I come up with inevitably run into road blocks pretty quickly. Here's one example: why have a separate l…

When I started on my first project as a junior engineer I thought I was being clever to build an app without any passwords: every time you wanted to login you received a new email with a link to log you in. Technically, this worked great but after a while I received many complaints from frustrated users who kept looking for the “signup form”…

Amazon does this! Morons will ask you to "click the link in the sms" to "authorise access". I can understand doing this randomly once or twice, for security. But every single time!? Figured they were doing it for two reasons - data-mining (to figure out what mobile phone and mobile browser yo have, and to leave an Amazon cookie on your mobile browser), and to harass you into installing and using the Amazon app instead of the website. Had to call customer support multiple times before this stopped (who kept urging me to install the Amazon app).

Re: Why don’t we do email verification in reverse?

#300
post #94
post #5

A general rule of thumb I've built up over the years: resist the temptation to innovate around login! Look at the most commonly used flows that are not obviously terrible and try to implement as close a match to them as possible. When I've tried to innovate around login in the past I've found that any clever ideas I come up with inevitably run into road blocks pretty quickly. Here's one example: why have a separate l…

Super typical developer thinking :) two pieces of code look the same but are not doing the same things. I usually see it when people implement add/edit for some entity, that should be separate forms but are crammed into one to be "DRY".

On the contrary, CRUD forms are an ideal candidate for being schema-driven.
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