Please confirm your email address

http://bvckup.tumblr.com/post/9101329123/please-confirm-your-email-address

by huhtenberg • 15 years ago

422 79 15 years ago

bvckup.tumblr.com

cpeterso• 15 years ago

You might also consider adding a web bug image to your confirmation email. If the user loads the confirmation email's HTML, you know it is a real email address even if they don't click the confirmation link.

Admittedly, it might be someone ELSE'S email address, but they could manually unsubscribe from your mailing list later.

moonlighter2• 15 years ago

Using image links 'calling back home' isn't reliable, because email clients have options to prevent such images from being shown automatically, especially if those emails might be considered spam.

philfreo2• 15 years ago

Considering Outlook and Gmail block them by default, it's extremely unreliable

nupark2• 15 years ago

Admittedly, it might be someone ELSE'S email address, but they could manually unsubscribe from your mailing list later.

That's half the point of verifying e-mail addresses. Doing this is likely to engender significant ill-will in anyone who is an unintended recipient of your e-mails.

blakeperdue• 15 years ago

I have a different view. I hate having to confirm my email address when I signup for a mailing list. It's more annoying to confirm my email address 50 times, versus the 1 time I have to unsubscribe from a list that someone signed me up for by accidentally entering my email address.

moeffju2• 15 years ago

For one, I don't know of any client that still loads remote images without confirmation, much less 1x1 tracking images.

Secondly, if I can sign someone else up without their knowledge and get you to send then unsolicited mail, you're risking legal problems.

latitude7• 15 years ago

That's my post there. It'd be very interesting to compare email confirmation rates. I am running on a private mail server that is configured according to all possible spam filtering guidelines and yet I am still at only 82%. I wonder if these 18% is just people overwhelmed with emails in their Inbox or if there's still some issues with being mis-categorized as a spam.

Anyone else cares to share their numbers?

moonlighter2• 15 years ago

No scientific data here, but it sounds to me that 82% is pretty damn good. You'll never reach 100% because there'll always be folks who sign up and then simply don't follow thru. I know I'm guilty of that. It's like handing out Broadway show flyers... just because I take one doesn't mean I'm going to actually buy tickets to see the show.

larrik• 15 years ago

If you are looking for confirmations... perhaps a percentage just didn't use valid emails? Possibly accidentally?

latitude7• 15 years ago

Yep, there are dupes and there are mistyped addresses. But plenty of unconfirmed @gmail.com (about 50%) as well as addresses personal servers (on judging by the domain names).

philfreo2• 15 years ago

Are you tracking emails that bounce? Or people that have whitelists of who can email them? Then there's the people who always send signups to a special yahoo signup address they rarely check. You can probably do a little better than 82%, but I doubt you'll ever beat 95%.

dennisgorelik3• 15 years ago

What's the best wording for email body with confirmation link?

Currently I use:

====

Please open this link to confirm your email:

http://www.postjobfree.com/a.aspx?k=c3d26a0fc5d145cf88898a92...

This link will expire on: 8/19/2011 10:29:11 PM EST.

====

Thanks for the tip about subject for email confirmation!

In the past I was using "Link to confirm your PostJobFree email", but your new version with clear call to action ("Please confirm your email address") should perform better.

jcampbell13• 15 years ago

You should drop the bit about the expiration. It requires someone to do a timezone calculation to even figure out what it means, and you probably want them to click the link even if it has expired, then you can give a proper support message with what they need to do.

jabkobob2• 15 years ago

Please spell out the month name. In many countries dates are formatted as DD.MM.YYYY rather than MM/DD/YYYY. For example, a native German speaker will have a lot of trouble recognizing that date. Especially if it is something like 8/7/2011 (is that August 7 or July 8?)

If you write the date as "August 8, 2011" it should be trivial to parse for everyone. (Except for people using different calendars)

qw• 15 years ago

I think it would be even more user friendly if you included a more readable expiration. Something like "this link will expire in 2 days (8/19/2011 10:29:11 PM EST)". This gives the user a more understandable deadline, without having to check the current date

rufus_t• 15 years ago

Surely you don't need expiry to be accurate to the second. Also, most people in the world have no idea where "EST" is (or even what it means).

Why not just say "The link is valid until August 19", and then let it expire some time after all the world has moved on to the 20th? (No MM/DD or DD/MM. Please.)

I personally prefer the old fashioned "Just reply to this mail" method, which many mailing lists use for confirmation, to opening a browser window - in the worst case I have to wait for my browser to launch, too - and I'm going to close that window immediately anyway so I can get back to what I was actually doing, so I just think "I'll get to that later", but then I don't, and when I remember [did I click that link? I'm pretty sure I did, so there's probably a bug in their list somewhere and I shall ignore them henceforth], the link has probably expired anyway [can't be bothered checking what time and day it is in "EST" (Estonia?)] so I'll just browse around for funny kittens instead. And all of that just because somebody wanted me to click on a link. They're sooo cute!

codingsolo• 15 years ago

Exactly, and only, what this is: a subject with a clear call to action instead of a subject that seems to indicate that this email was generated as an auto-response to a previous action and contained a body that did not require user interaction.

prawn2• 15 years ago

What about:

Next Step: Confirm your email address

Thinking along the lines of how "Follow me on Twitter" tests better than "If you liked this blog entry, please follow me on Twitter." Just give people a direct order. "Next step" might make it clearer that they're not yet finished with the process?

rodh• 15 years ago

Interesting idea. Having said that, "Next Step" makes it sounds like a longer process. It doesn't seem like I won't be quite done after this.

I think rewarding the user for singing up would be an interesting incentive. "Click the link to receive your first email".

Having said that, unlike registration confirmations, where I would like to get back out of my inbox to your site. For mailing lists, I don't need to go back to your site, really. I'd much rather stay in my inbox if that's ok. I'd quite like to see an A/B test between the usual method and a request for people reply to the email, rather than click a link. "Reply to this email to start receiving updates": simple order, direct resulting action. It also makes it sound like a similar action will be required to stop receiving updates.

minikomi• 15 years ago

"Awaiting email confirmation"

jcampbell13• 15 years ago

I am consistently running around 75%, with subject line "Confirm your email address". I am going to change it to "Please confirm your email address".

I send the confirmation emails through Google's email servers (Google Apps).

update: If I break it down by domain, I see gmail->80%, yahoo->70%, and hotmail->66%.

jcampbell13• 15 years ago

You should be able to get to 95%. On the form there is no indication that an action is required after entering my email address. I also see a generic "support" as the sender in gmail.

latitude7• 15 years ago

Go, click on that link already. You are skewing my beautiful stats :)

Good point regarding the sender name. I will play with it once HN wave subsides.

Liu• 15 years ago

Does simply seeing 82% vs. 50% enough? Shouldn't there be some significance measurements added to it? If you had only 6 people in this experiment maybe it is just a statistical error...

metageek3• 15 years ago

If there were 6 people, he wouldn't be saying 82%. 83%, maybe.

revorad• 15 years ago

Are you going to email old subscribers (who didn't confirm) a reminder with the new subject line?

latitude7• 15 years ago

Ha. That's a nice idea. Let me see if it works :)

MatthewPhillips• 15 years ago

These are the types of stories I like to see on the front page of HN.

um3shg• 15 years ago

BasDirks2• 15 years ago

To +1 a comment, click the upward triangle next to the commenters name.

yycom• 15 years ago

Isn't this just obvious though?

Tyrannosaurs• 15 years ago

Possibly, but like many things that are "obvious" they seem not to happen as often as you'd think they should.

emil0r• 15 years ago

In hindsight. The problem is often that we as programmers name things after what we use it for internally, or where we want to end up. Ie, we want an email conformation, but the customer that has to send it, so please do.

StrawberryFrog• 15 years ago

Yes but.

Imagine yourself as a user of this service. You sign up, get the "email confirmation", think everything is good. A day later you notice that it isn't working, check up, actually read the email and click the link.

Now you want to report a bug. What do you say? How do you explain that you got it to work, but it could have worked better? When there's a large helpdesk, this kind of feedback is nearly impossible to give in any meaningful way. Even if you could speak to the coders concerned, often it's hard to get them to think in a different way and see the problem.

So it's obvious but it's hard.

monochromatic• 15 years ago

There are a ton of things that are obvious once you think of them.

Sukotto• 15 years ago

Lots of things are obvious in retrospect or when pointed out but opaque before then.

And some things are obvious to you and amazing to others http://sivers.org/obvious

ez77• 15 years ago

Indeed, but in this case I wish I could upvote it without saving it.

acangiano• 15 years ago

For AnyNewBooks.com I have the following thank you page: http://anynewbooks.com/thank-you/

And the email I send has the subject: "Please confirm your subscription"

Between the two, the message is fairly clear. Yet, I still receive emails from novice users once in a while, who aren't familiar with the concept of "confirming" a subscription. Usability isn't easy.

cyhperpunks• 15 years ago

Not to detract from your nice design, but wouldn't something like this be more effective?

http://i.imgur.com/d98aC.jpg

That is, downsized screenshot, with graphics drawn on top. I think the original looks too much like a real window.

hdctambien• 15 years ago

It might be interesting to add a click event on the link in the image and track how many people actually "click here" on the image of an inbox.

Maybe even have a popup that triggers if that link is clicked that says something like: "Sorry, this is just a screenshot. Please check your email inbox for this message"

MicahWedemeyer• 15 years ago

Nor will it ever be perfect. No matter how friendly you make it, there will always be people who deftly dodge every piece of helpful info or design you throw at them.

duck• 15 years ago

I think it totally depends on your subscriber base, but with Hacker Newsletter I've seen about a 95% success rate. I have always used the default MailChimp subject which is "Hacker Newsletter List: Please Confirm Subscription".

EGreg• 15 years ago

We had a cool thing. We let the user use our site once, but to "activate their account" and set up a password, they had to click the link in their email. Otherwise they would be reminded next time they tried to sign in (without a password)

It gave people an incentive to verify their email!

Check out blurts.com and qbix.com for examples

starpilot• 15 years ago

Using the imperative wording "please confirm" suggests the recipient must take an action, rather than passively receive information. This reminds me of a Mac OS X Human Interface Guideline:

"Use a verb or verb phrase for the title of a push button. The title you create should describe the action the button performs—Save, Close, Print, Delete, Change Password, and so on."

http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/UserEx...

The difference between "Email confirmation" and "Please confirm your email" is like that between "Ok" and "Save."

rickmb• 15 years ago

I remember a talk by Terry Chay in which he showed that adding a smiley to the subject (don't remember the project) dramatically increased the response.

Little details can make such a big difference.

cema• 15 years ago

This is surprising to me. I would expect that I would more easily mis-categorize such an email as spam (than the one without a smiley).

joshu• 15 years ago

This is good. I wish more people would talk about email praxis because it seems like voodoo a lot of the time.

Do we even really need to confirm email addresses?

moeffju2• 15 years ago

Yes, at least in Germany, you have to show that the user confirmed their email, or risk a cease and desist when you mail them otherwise. Some lawyers send those for fun and profit.

sudonim• 15 years ago

We use the Devise gem https://github.com/plataformatec/devise and the default subject line is: "Confirmation instructions". I can't say anyone on our team thought to change it. Good clear language like "Please confirm your email address" would be great to have as the default in gems like devise

trustfundbaby• 15 years ago

I bet the one with the title "Email confirmation" was going to spam folders ... I've seen a lot of spam with that exact title when I'm cleaning out my gmail spam folder

pkamb• 15 years ago

This always bothered me about SEOmoz's new public analytics button on all their blog updates.

The button says "Post Analytics". That makes me think "send analytic to SEOmoz". But what they really mean is "view this blog post's analytics".

resdirector• 15 years ago

I use usertesting.com. You get a ten minute video and audio of testers using your site. These types of small (aka big) problems are weeded out pretty quickly.

Can't rate them high enough.

Tilleul• 15 years ago

78 comments so far, and not one mention of technical writing. I have to admit that I almost never hear about hiring or contracting with tech writers in early-stage startups. But it might be a worthwhile idea.

I'm a tech writer, and I hope that not too much self-advertising for my first post here.

Please confirm your email address

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