Why is it important to do Email verification upon sign up and is it "mandatory"?

Question

More than a handful of websites don't require registrants to verify their Email and they seem to work fine without obliging you to go through this (minor) ordeal.

It seems logical this mechanism would assure email validity and would deter a robot non grata, but is it pertinent for a low user functionality website, for example only for writing comments or anything relatively harmless like that, to enforce it?

I appreciate your opinions, I've just been contemplating this on the website i'm building. Cheers and happy holidays everyone!

Answer 1

Some pros to skipping verification:

1. a bigger list, of course
2. genuinely-interested people don't find themselves off your list because they weren't aware of needing to confirm

Some cons:

1. a lower-quality list: people make typos.
2. a lower-quality list: people weren't aware or forgot they signed up and don't want to be getting these.
3. a more "spammy" vibe, hard to quantify and depends on the circumstances.

I've stayed with the confirmation (double opt-in). If I dropped the confirmation step, could this lead to more people hitting the 'This is spam' button in their online accounts? What happens if you hit gmail's threshold here and they blacklist you? Yes, all speculation but you need to make a risk assessment here.

Answer 2

Before you can answer whether you should validate the users email, you need to have a good understanding of why are you collecting it and what do you want to do with it.

• If you are just collecting emails to sell to bulk mailers, there's no reason to validate it.
• If you want to send the occasional email, you might validate it but you don't have to do it right away.
• If you want to have an established communication channel with the user before you let them use advanced functionality, you need to validate it, but you don't need to block their access until that happens.
• if you plan on using the email as identity representation (you shouldn't, but that's a separate topic), you need to validate the email and hold on the account establishing until that happens.