Please Stop Verifying My Email Address
medium.com
Please Stop Verifying My Email Address
1–10 of 37 posts
Re: Please Stop Verifying My Email Address
#2This entire article runs on the assumption that the user will, at a time they choose, type their email address correctly.
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 ...
Re: Please Stop Verifying My Email Address
#3Almost as irritating: requiring that people sign in to your site via Facebook or Twitter, which in turn requires that they be members of these websites. I'm looking at you Medium.com.
Re: Please Stop Verifying My Email Address
#4And what about email address as a username? I have it like this on one site so the user has 2 in 1 - username and email in one.
Re: Please Stop Verifying My Email Address
#5How about verifying at a later time, and granting access temporarily? At some point they'll check their email? Does this strategy work? And if they typed their email address incorrectly, maintain a cookie to point to the account and allow them to set a new email address (if persistent login is enabled)?
Re: Please Stop Verifying My Email Address
#6For a lot of services, verifying e-mail addresses is primarily a means to filter a majority of spam accounts - think bulletin boards, buy/sell sites, etc. It is by no means perfect, but it's an easy, low-hanging fruit. It is only secondarily a check to see if the user misspelled his or her e-mail address (which is often checked by having two e-mail fields and comparing them).
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.
Re: Please Stop Verifying My Email Address
#7And what about email address as a username? I have it like this on one site so the user has 2 in 1 - username and email in one.
Bet bugbear is any site that insist on labelling it username when you try to log-in but it's really your email address. If I don't use the site regularly then I can never remember whether it's going to be user123 or user123@example.com. Frustrating experience that is then often followed by the same site have an unusual set of password acceptable letters that I can never remember so I then have to get everything reset.
Re: Please Stop Verifying My Email Address
#8How about: consider your use case first.
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.
Re: Please Stop Verifying My Email Address
#9Okay, I won't ask you for your email address when creating your account. Instead, please write down this GUID which you'll need to login next time.
Re: Please Stop Verifying My Email Address
#10This entire article runs on the assumption that the user will, at a time they choose, type their email address correctly. 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…
It has been interesting to see the rise of forms that wish you to type in your email address not once, but twice. In an attempt to verify the user entered it correctly.
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.