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Please Stop Verifying My Email Address

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Re: Please Stop Verifying My Email Address

#11

Post by Kequc »

doppel wrote: post #6

For 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 mi…

Most web browsers remember the email address that was entered on login forms or even on signup forms their email might be pre filled for them. But it's true if the user enters the wrong email address and then never notices it's incorrect, could result in a problem later down the road if the email address is a login.

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.

Re: Please Stop Verifying My Email Address

#12

Post by kaiserama »

verelo wrote: post #8

How 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…

Agree, I've had numerous situations with a site I created that didn't have email verification where users reported problems logging back into their account.

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.

Re: Please Stop Verifying My Email Address

#13

Post by verelo »

kaiserama wrote: post #12
verelo wrote: post #8

How 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…

Agree, I've had numerous situations with a site I created that didn't have email verification where users reported problems logging back into their account. 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 mis…

Yeah that is the primary issue we encounter regarding logins. People often type .con .cim etc (mainly from our iOS or Android apps) and the end result is confusion.

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).

Re: Please Stop Verifying My Email Address

#14

Post by Kequc »

jasonjei wrote: post #5

How 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)?

Being as polite as possible I would say yes please. When I sign up for a service I may only intend to try it out with the potential of using it long term. So if my email address were incorrect, fixing it later would be something that mattered to me at that time.

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.

Re: Please Stop Verifying My Email Address

#15

Post by shdon »

ColinWright wrote: post #2

This 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…

In general, I've found that users really are idiots when it comes to typing that in. One of the things my company does is organise events, sometimes free, sometimes paid for. Hundreds of people sign up. In order to be allowed entry, they will need to get an e-ticket (which is emailed to them a week in advance). My boss considers e-mail verification too much of a hassle. The result? Roughly 10% of the users mistype their own e-mail address (a similar percentage mistype their own name), usually with a single letter missing -- obvious typos.

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).

Re: Please Stop Verifying My Email Address

#16

Post by naelyn »

stevekemp wrote: post #10
ColinWright wrote: post #2

This 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.

> 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).

Re: Please Stop Verifying My Email Address

#17

Post by tiptup »

In addition to ensure they typed their email address correctly, I am happy with email verification as users seem to have taken my (short and sweet) address as their catch all email registration. And there's nothing I can do about these reminder emails apart from one provider as there's nothing in the email to tell them 'it's not me so go away'. They just tell me to ignore the email. It's just annoying I have to 'ignore' 100+ emails in my inbox that keeps popping up.

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.

Re: Please Stop Verifying My Email Address

#18

Post by ColinWright »

shdon wrote: post #15
ColinWright wrote: post #2

This 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…

In general, I've found that users really are idiots when it comes to typing that in. One of the things my company does is organise events, sometimes free, sometimes paid for. Hundreds of people sign up. In order to be allowed entry, they will need to get an e-ticket (which is emailed to them a week in advance). My boss considers e-mail verification too much of a hassle. The result? Roughly 10% of the users mistype th…

  > I've found that users really are idiots
  > when it comes to typing that in.
They're not idiots. It is normal for people not to work at the level of precision that this sort of thing requires. Decades of work on these sorts of things have shown me that it is computer programmers who are not normal. The ability to get thousands, even millions of characters exactly right is extremely unusual, even with extended training.

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.

Re: Please Stop Verifying My Email Address

#19

Post by ColinWright »

For reference, about 20 minutes ago this item triggered the flame-war detector circuit and the resulting penalization of the ranking got it dropped off the front page.

Just so people know why this has 7 points in quick succession, but is not on the front page:

http://hnrankings.info/6405186/

Re: Please Stop Verifying My Email Address

#20

Post by dorfsmay »

It's a one to many reltionship. That's why. Yes auser can have an infinite number of email address, but an email address should belong to one user only. Why create a new user id that has to be unique and that I have to remember when I have this unique thing you can additionally use when I firget my password?
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