Who came up with confirming registration by email?

I real­ize usabil­ity people, and people who are simply curi­ous, have prob­a­bly raised this ques­tion more than once already, but I can’t help myself:

Who came up with con­firm­ing reg­is­tra­tion by email?

I mean fol­low­ing the spe­cially gen­er­ated link you get by email after you register. As I under­stand it, this counts as a way to pro­tect against reg­is­tra­tions by bots? Then what is the captcha in the reg­is­tra­tion form for?

I’ve started to sus­pect this is one of those random bits of silli­ness some­one invented at the very dawn of the inter­net that became conventional wisdom, a taken-for-granted fea­ture of websites. It’s a sim­i­lar story with the email field in com­ment forms (I read about this on some­one’s blog recently, sorry, I don’t remem­ber whose). Blogs often have no way to sub­scribe to new com­ments in the com­ment form, but they do have a required email field…

Asking for con­fir­ma­tion looks espe­cially funny in online stores, where reg­is­tra­tion often adds prac­ti­cally no extra functionality.

Ubercart, the shopping-cart module for Drupal, has a nice built-in solu­tion: when a user places an order, the system reg­is­ters them auto­mat­i­cally, and they’re logged in by the end of checkout. How?

It takes their email and cuts out every­thing before the @: that’s the login. The pass­word is sent to their email. A very ele­gant solu­tion, I think.

Update. Someone has sug­gested that get­ting the link checks the email address was entered correctly. I think that argu­ment only holds if the site’s audi­ence is inexperienced.

Update 2. Right, Comrade @Shireedan pointed out that

this solu­tion has one big flaw: logins can clash, because there are so many email providers.