In April of last year I created a new twitter account. I can’t remember exactly why, but it was a throwaway created to look at some aspect of how twitter interacts with new accounts. As part of the account creation process I gave Twitter an email address. They sent me a confirmation message right away: I didn’t click the button. Four months later they sent me another confirmation...
Today I received an email from Tumblr asking to confirm I still wanted the username I have there. I’ve not really been using Tumblr, I contributed a few things to the now-defunct Box of Meat, but I don’t really post there much. I think this kind of engagement is great. Confirming user names will do a whole lot to allow Tumblr to release some claimed but unused names back into the pool...
Recently I got an email from Tor. Apparently they’re watching their opens and clicks and they noticed I hadn’t loaded any images recently. We notice you haven’t opened the Tor.com newsletter in a while, and that’s okay: we know you’re busy. That’s why we create our newsletter from scratch each week, to highlight the articles we think you’ll love and round...
I got multiple copies of a request to “confirm my email address” recently. What’s interesting is the text surrounding the confirmation request. Hello, I have a list of potential customers in your area. The list includes several ways for you to contact them. I would like to send you a sample of this list to the address I have on file: spamtrap@example.com. Can you call me today...
One of the biggest arguments against confirmation is that it’s too hard and that there is too much drop off from subscribers. In other words, recipients don’t want to confirm because it’s too much work on their part. I don’t actually think it’s too much work for recipients. In fact, when a sender has something the recipient wants then they will confirm. A couple...
The idea of confirming permission to send mail to an email address gets a lot of bad press among many marketers. It seems that every few weeks some new person decides that they’re going to write an article or a whitepaper or a blog and destroy the idea behind confirming an email address. And, of course, that triggers a bunch of people to publish rebuttal articles and blog posts. I’m...
A colleague was asking about confirming transactional mail today. It seems a couple of big retailers got SBLed today for sending receipts to spamtraps. I talked a few weeks ago about why it’s important to let people unsubscribe from transactional email, and many of those same things apply to confirming receipts. First, let’s look at what Spamhaus has to say. Initially they listed the...
Yesterday I talked about registration confirmations. Today I’m going to talk about a couple recent experiences with websites and their registration failures. The first experience was with Yelp. One of my readers decided I needed a Yelp account and created one using my laura-questions email address. Yelp understands that people will be jerks and so sent me an email to confirm the account. Hi...
Confirming email addresses during a website registration process is a good practice. It stops people from creating fake accounts, abusing resources and using that site as a mechanism for harassment. But simply sending out a confirmation mail is not sufficient to prevent problems, particularly when everything about the process assumes that unconfirmed registrations are actually valid and not...
A lot of marketers tell me “no sender confirms addresses” or “confirming addresses is too hard for the average subscriber.” I find both these arguments difficult to accept. Just today I subscribed to a mailing list that had a confirmation step. The subscription form was pretty simple. I entered my email address into a webform, hit submit and was taken to another page. Once...
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