The discussion revolves around the idea of sending an email to activate an account on Discourse, as an alternative to receiving an activation email. fantasticfears suggests providing an option to let users send an email to a specific address to activate their account, which would include a unique key for validation.
However, codinghorror expresses concerns that this approach is unconventional and has not seen it implemented elsewhere. downey notes that similar behavior has been seen in old-school LISTSERV implementations.
Others, including DeanMarkTaylor and riking, raise concerns that this approach does not prove email address ownership, as emails can be easily forged. They argue that receiving an email is not sufficient to confirm authenticity, and that the ability to send an email from an address does not necessarily mean the user can receive emails at that address.
Ultimately, fantasticfears concludes that only receiving an email can prove authenticity, and suggests closing the topic.
Email providers may fail to send an email. Confirmation email may lost on the way. In some conditions, polling a mailbox may much reliable rather than sending an email.
Can we have an option to let user sending an email to Discourse if polling enables. Says:
If you still encounter a problem, send a email to ‘poll+{key}@discourse.org’ to activate your account. You may have to wait for several minutes for activation.
I can’t say I’ve seen any other website do this? Feels mighty weird to me.
One thing that has been suggested which I do want to add, is the ability to change the email address at this stage if you typed it in wrong or just used the wrong email account.
No. You can’t find a fairly good example of this. It’s just a thought to provides another way to help activation process. Subscription to some mailing list has a similar process. But it is not aligned with account registration/activation.
It’s an edge case but might be a way to mitigate email being rejected by email services. In this scenario, Gmail filters the spam but not rejected email. But for few email services, they rejected the emails if you send email over a certain limit (the limit is credential). Those services don’t care about whether the mail comes from MailGun and etc.
For instance, mail.qq.com rejects emails from a IP if it sends email over a limit per hour/day. Unfortunately, they do have 300m+ users. FYI, companies want to make sure their email arrived, they will build a email server on their own and ask Tencent to whitelist this server.
Basically, this way is not elegant at all and it’s not Discourse’s fault. Anyway, I will put this thought here. Even if it’s not a core feature, it can be a plugin.
This feature request is irrelevant to change email address though. The key matches exactly the same email provided. If this feature is going to be implemented, when a user change the email address in that stage, a new key will be assigned to confirm new email.
