The reasons are: 1. People who don't like you won't be able to subscribe you to (legitimate) stuff you don't want, therefore flooding your inbox with legitimate e-mails that won't be blocked by SPAM filters. 2. You are making sure you didn't make a typo in your e-mail in case you need to reset your password, so that somebody with similar address doesn't get your password. 3. Obvious marketing legal reasons (double opt-in, i.e. you did confirm that you want to receive marketing spam from us).

The "easy" signup isn't with username-password-email-submit, it's with OpenID.

This. If you are not doing confirmed (aka "double") opt-in, your list will be abused and you will definitely be regarded as a spammer.

Not to mention double opt-in is required by most certified email services before you can use them.

Yep. Then the fine upstanding email services get your email into their inbox precisely because they're religious about who they let use them. Which is, of course, the whole point of the exercise.

I was about to post almost exactly this to the link's comments, but they wanted me to sign up first, perhaps to confirm my identity. Irony much?

Agree on all points. Including OpenID.

I'm as anti-hassle as it gets, but I think email validation actually makes sense. If a company NEEDS my email address for communication, go on and verify if it works and an overly eager spam filter inbetween does not eats everything up. Or if, god forbid, I accidentally put a comma instead of a period somewhere while typing.

If they don't care whether I can be reached by that email address, why even bother asking for one?

For example to send forgotten password ;)

If user enters a real email - he will get a new password in that case. If not... well, it's his problem.

I have a funny feeling you do not charge money for stuff. When regina123@aoll.com can't log in after paying $30 for the privilege to do so, it is my problem.

This was a problem I ran into. Originally my application did not require an email, but I ran into so many forgotten password cases that I eventually had to add one. And I felt it was my responsibility to help those users as most apps have that feature and usernames can be easy to forget.

Your root account should start receiving your newsletters shortly.

The reason is simply that some sites value having a valid e-mail address over the percentage that they loose by having a validate e-mail step.

Like it or not, e-mail is pretty much the only way to get in contact with people who don't login all the time.

Yes. I'm glad that the web is moving toward the easy signup: [username] [password] [email] (optional), and do everything else later. As a user more than a developer, it's so nice to move past the usability problems of last decade.

If you use Damien Katz's Negative Captcha, you can even skirt the captcha, if your users aren't malicious: just have an invisible honeypot field called "email" for the botspam to fill out, and call the visible email field something else.

I prefer verify, mostly because with a very common First-Initial-Plus-Common-Last-Name@gmail I get an insane number of idiots typing in my email address somewhere. (I really don't know if people think it's theirs, or if they just don't want to enter an address.)

A verify gives me a chance to cut off the pseudo-spam before it gets started.

On Woobius, we verify email addresses because those are people's work email addresses, typically, and so they are identified, to their colleagues, by those email addresses. It'd be terrible if someone was able to use our systems to pretend to be, say, norman.foster@fosterandpartners.com without even the simplest verification.

w/o email verification it removes even the minor level of "trust" established by using an email.

I could sign up as linus.torvalds@linux.com. It means you cant trust a word I say comes from who it appears to!

And if nothing else; not having email verification means yo have to build a "dispute email" system. Which is open to yet more abuse ;)

Two things:

You have to verify their e-mail address before you subscribe them to stuff, otherwise you will get branded as a spammer. But also...

If a new user hasn't verified their e-mail address yet, is that reason enough to deny them further use of the site? I don't think so.

A good practice I use is to give users a "trial period" (usually 24 hours) before they must verify. Users can sign up for the site and immediately start using it, then next time they check their email just click the link. Many people will check their email at least once per day anyways.

Or, if they don't check it and try to log in after 24 hours, they get a message saying they need to verify their email address and the option to re-send the verification email.

I have had several cases where someone with a similar email address to mine signed up for Myspace, Bebo, and CareerBuilder with my email by mistake (I think it really was a mistake). The stupidest thing is, these websites gladly reset the password for his account by sending it to my email, giving me access to all the data he had put on all these websites: names of friends, home address, place of employment, some possibly embarrassing forums he frequented, etc.

There are already solutions to this.

The blogger uses Disqus for comment, which allows you to Sign in via Twitter and OpenID.

If you use OpenID w/ AX or SREG you can get the users email address, which is even nicer. Done and done.