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by chrispauley 2339 days ago
> Well, if you use something called a "sniper link", you might make your users' lives easier. Simply go to your inbox and run a search that displays your confirmation email. Then copy that link, and use that on your confirmation page. Then your users will be directed straight to the actual email. This saves them time, and improves the overall user experience.

Never heard of this before, I'm assuming it means generate a link to a search which will show the confirmation email based on the domain of the email address. This will likely not work for anyone using a work email unless you do some snooping on the DNS for that domain (sorry B2B).

1 comments

It seems that the term comes from here https://growth.design/case-studies/trello-user-onboarding/ and it means that you can add search parameters in the link, e.g. https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#search/from%3A%40trello.co...
That actually sounds like a cool SaaS business idea on it's own.

Create an API to convert email addresses like example@gmail.com to links with custom search parameters like so: hxxps://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#search/from%3Aexample.com+subject%3AComplete+Registration+in%3Aanywhere

The problem with this approach is that you assume the user only has one email address signed in. They might have `/u/1/` as their personal email used on your website. This could cause more confusion than help since this isn't common practice. (Plus you are assuming gmail.)
> Plus you are assuming gmail.

There aren't any assumptions. You use this method if the user provided a gmail address. Users of other email services fall back to the default method.

It's not just gmail, but G Suite. The idea is to look up the MX records and detect this.