[echelon]

> There is no advantage.

I can't tell you how many times email verification context switches made me completely lose track of what I was doing.

There's literally no worse context switch than having to go into your inbox, wait for an email, then come back to the appropriate tab to complete registration or login.

There are probably dozens, maybe hundreds, of services I never finished registering for all on account of this problem.

I worked authc/authz and security for a large fintech and we constantly butted heads against the growth folks. They fought hard and eventually won the right to do account creation and IDV without email verification. You don't have to verify your email until you're already making transactions, and that does wonders for growth. We're still accountable for all the stringent KYC regulations, of course.

[prmoustache]

> There are probably dozens, maybe hundreds, of services I never finished registering for all on account of this problem.

Sounds like a useful and very effective filter to not create accounts for things that do not really matters to you.

[wl]

And when a customer fat fingered their email address and that fintech company didn't bother verifying email addresses, policy probably prohibited granting a request from the email address owner to remove their address from the account because they're not the financial account owner. Fortunately for that company, financial institutions seem to avoid Gmail's spam filter no matter how many times I mark those emails as spam.

[sliken]

What's worse is that the email is often delayed at the sender (cheap bulk email services) or the receiver (gray listing), but for no reason I can fathom have a short expiration date.

What's worse they are often unique AND delivered out of order AND have no timestamp or sequence number. So you get to guess which is the newest, using any other fails, and the ones that succeed often time out before they can be used.

Having an expiration date as short as 15 minutes seems insane and counter productive.

[0x073]

> There's literally no worse context switch than having to go into your inbox, wait for an email, then come back to the appropriate tab to complete registration or login.

Then it's something maybe the customer isn't interested in the first place. Most of the time mail just works for me only issues are sometimes greylisting and it takes hours.

I can understand it from the company side, but not sure how well it really works when someone use a mail app on mobile and on desktop not even logged into the mail account.