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Removing email registration improved retention

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Re: Removing email registration improved retention

#171

Post by gwbas1c »

throwayws wrote: post #24
gwbas1c wrote: post #13

Honestly, I hate managing accounts and passwords so much that I'll walk away when a "create an account" is thrown in my face. Login via Google / Facebook / Whatever is sometimes helpful, but it usually results in SPAM. For example, I logged into Redfin through Google and they immediately started spamming me. Other times, when I login through Facebook and disable sharing my email, the site that I'm trying to log into…

How do you avoid getting spam to random addresses using catchall?

Years ago I just set up some filters. There's only about 5-10 email addresses that get hammered with SPAM.

Gmail handles the rest.

Re: Removing email registration improved retention

#172

Post by rootsudo »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #121
spsful wrote: post #92

>you can target them on Quora, Reddit etc as well. This is one of the reasons I stopped giving out my primary email address for user signups. I use a service called Blur which allows for unlimited "masked" emails to be created, allowing me to give companies read-only email addresses. In the four years I've had it I have created 378 email addresses. If I'm including the email addresses that I've already deleted, the l…

Once the marketers discover people are doing this, they'll ban email addresses from this service as if they were fraudulent. Wouldn't be surprised if companies started disallowing everything except gmail.

They already do.

Re: Removing email registration improved retention

#173

Post by edmundsauto »

snowwrestler wrote: post #63
black_puppydog wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, one implies a causality that the other doesn't.

"More serious trialer" is not a fixed attribute or category that you can select for. A person fits this description based solely on their behavior; they become a more serious trialer by the act of putting in their email address. From that point the causality is the same.

Yes - my point was that the narrative of "why" isn't useful. A/B tests tell you what happened. They do not provide insight into why. Yet everyone has a story they tell to fill in the why, and these stories are harmful to making good decisions.

Re: Removing email registration improved retention

#174

Post by Silhouette »

gingerlime wrote: post #144
Silhouette wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things get murky in this area (or perhaps not, the lawyers will figure it out in time). If Facebook is only using something like a hash of an email address in order to target ads at specific Facebook users at the request of one of their advertisers, they are probably only acting as a data processor for a very specific purpose that might be acceptable for both Facebook themselves and the advertiser under the GDPR rule…

Always enjoy reading your insightful comments Silhouette! I think Facebook hashes any plain text you give it client side to (try) to buffer their defenses... but I’m not sure. It’s a theater. I wrote a blog post about this data sharing with Facebook https://blog.gingerlime.com/2020/whos-sharing-my-data-and-wh... that digs a little in this direction.

Thank you, that's nice of you to say, but I claim no special insight here. I just happen to live in the UK where these issues are relevant and to have some professional experience dealing with them.

Re: Removing email registration improved retention

#177

Post by mceachen »

hinkley wrote: post #137
mceachen wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're using gmail, plus-suffixing is a low-effort but effective countermeasure: username+servicename@gmail.com gets delivered to username@gmail.com.

I have about a 20% failure rate where email address validation fields reject the + character

Ah. You can set up dash-suffixing if you're using a custom domain with gmail. Create a new "catch-all" email account. Log into that new catch-all account, and create forwarding rules for alice-* to go to alice@example.com, bob-* to go to bob@example.com, ...

I've done this for more than a decade.

Re: Removing email registration improved retention

#178

Post by prawn »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #121
spsful wrote: post #92

>you can target them on Quora, Reddit etc as well. This is one of the reasons I stopped giving out my primary email address for user signups. I use a service called Blur which allows for unlimited "masked" emails to be created, allowing me to give companies read-only email addresses. In the four years I've had it I have created 378 email addresses. If I'm including the email addresses that I've already deleted, the l…

Once the marketers discover people are doing this, they'll ban email addresses from this service as if they were fraudulent. Wouldn't be surprised if companies started disallowing everything except gmail.

Gmail is where most of my form spam comes from!

Re: Removing email registration improved retention

#179

Post by buzzert »

newscracker wrote: post #143
buzzert wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I registered a domain name that’s basically just a UUID, and pointed it’s MX records to my self-hosted email server (you could also point it to Google Apps or Fastmail). Everything before the UUID domain is just the name of the service, so something like hackernews@e913ff00...xyz. If someone sells out my email address, I can instantly burn it by just adding a sieve rule since they’re all unique. I even know who sold…

Looks like a nice idea, since I’ve pondered about getting a name that’s not really meaningful or connected to my identities. 1. What’s the length of the UUID that you use? 2. Haven’t you encountered forms that have shorter email address length limits? 3. Also, wouldn’t such a domain be seen as a spammer/scammer when machine learning starts taking over signup/registration systems?

1. It is 21 characters long

2. Nope! I would be surprised to see that nowadays.

3. For sending mail, yes absolutely. Receiving mail is a different story though, it seems like most systems do not care.

Re: Removing email registration improved retention

#180

Post by chrisdbanks »

edmundsauto wrote: post #45
chrisdbanks wrote: post #28

Email registration is the gateway drug to conversion. We AB tested this. Requiring users to sign up meant we got fewer sign ups but a higher conversion rate to premium. So although we had fewer users, more paid. Giving your email is a committment. Maybe once you've made a small committment it's easier to make a bigger committment. If you're running a commercial product, especially freemium, it's not just about number…

How do you know that it wasn't caused simply by selecting for more serious trialers? What makes you think the cause was "committing", and not a selection thing?

Because the conversion rate was higher from no sign-up to paid. So we were probably selecting more serious trailers, but they were then more likely to pay as well. If it was just the conversion rate from sign-up to paid then you would be right, but we looked at the conversion across the entire funnel.
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