Thanks for sharing your challenge here!

I also have seen Community Managers struggle with this from time to time. I do not have a really efficient solution for you, but I know that @Sebastian is currently looking for such feedback. I think it would be valuable to have automation to trigger a second mail to be sent at a later date if the account has not been activated.

You could also think about an integration to a tool with email capabilities like Hubspot. Maybe with Zapier or via the API, you could schedule checks for accounts that are stuck in this state and trigger Hubspot to send them an email. Integrations are not my strong point, but I could imagine this to work...

Hi there @JessEs , just chiming in: about 10% of our member base hasn’t activated their account yet so this feature would also be a need for us.

Currently we send a monthly newsletter to all our members, but have to exclude the “not activated” ones since they have not confirmed their email addresses and I believe we wouldn’t have the legal basis to email them.

I am also looking for automation in this area. I am currently manually emailing 2 days after the initial email, then holding that status for 6 months. Just getting to that marker now, so creating a message that says if they want to join the community, they will need to start the process over again. But not sure how to word it so that it sounds better than that.

I TRY to remember to do this weekly. It’s manual, but I do get a decent response rate. I pull a list of new joins and then email the people who haven’t confirmed their email address - to see if it was caught in spam filter, etc. I ask if they’d like me to bypass that step for them, which we can do on the backend.

This doesn’t account for people who incorrectly entered their email address though - as those just bounce back.

A bulk operation greatly makes sense for a manual regimen like this, just like assigning Custom roles..

But in general, wanted to check with friends here why do we need this additional step.

Why is the Email Confirmation needed?

Open for insights @Alistair FIeld, @DannyPancratz, @Daniele Cmty :)  

As far as I know, we’re not using the email confirmation step. I’ve never seen any of our users awaiting confirmation. Maybe it’s a setting? 

@DannyPancratz I think the confirmation step only occurs for the default authentication method in DH/Insided. So if you’re using SSO or any other authentication method you won’t run into the issue above.

Perhaps you have dodged a bullet there!

If you’re using default authentication then AFAIK you can’t switch off or automate around the confirmation step. @anirbandutta  and anyone else, I asked support about a bulk operation for this a while ago and -if I remember right - the answer was that the email confirmation step is needed for spam management and general opsec.

Without that confirmation step you can get hammered with fake/spammy registrations. Once someone works out you can do that with one community on DH then they’ll repeat that for all communities they can find. 

A workaround I tried was to change the role from “Users Awaiting E-mail Confirmation” to “Registered Users” using a Zapier Zap based on certain conditions that meant we already had the right consents in place to email them. Last I checked they’d locked that particular role change down.

Maybe it’s possible via the API or the Zapier options have changed since I last tried to do that. 

Hope that’s useful! 

Thanks for closing the loop here citing practical (and a pretty common) scenario@BenSmokeBall.

It would indeed leave a big vulnerability open to remove the Email confirmation step entirely.

No worries. In terms of that vulnerability I just think there are many ways to close it. It’d be nice to be able to take the safeties off and remove the confirmation step if the risks are managed in other ways.