---
title: "Who came up with confirming registration by email?"
author: "Stan Voo"
url: https://www.99rabbits.com/blog/who-came-up-with-confirming-registration-by-email
published: 2010-01-14
summary: "Confirmation links, required email fields in comment forms: some web conventions look like an accident that stuck. Ubercart does it better, with one catch."
---

# 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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conventional_wisdom "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](http://www.ubercart.org/ "http://www.ubercart.org/"), 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](http://twitter.com/Shireedan) pointed out that

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