How To Do Email Right

posted by hampton on July 28th, 2008

I’m just as guilty of this as anyone. I do this shit all the time. Send out an email, then require the user to login and put in extra effort to getting them to do what you are asking. This is retarded. Activation links (and auto-login links) should be standard in every app.

Heroku does this beautifully with their invite emails. Let’s check it out.

As you can see, a nice activation link. Just click on it and you are magically whisked to this next page.

It already knows who I am! Yes! I just need to type in my password. And, I’m all done! Every app should have these kind of details in them. Here is another site that does it right.

OKCupid takes it up another notch here. Every single link in this email is unique and is a randomized key. Clicking on any link will log you in. If I’m interested in a user, then link I follow looks like… “http://www.okcupid.com/l?dtnNa7A9yCcotqd” though it’s obviously styled here. It signs me in and sends me to the appropriate page.

I find myself using this site much more often because of this awesome feature. I don’t have to dig for usernames. Obviously, this wouldn’t work for something like online banking, because its rather insecure. But, at least it should guess my user name. And, for 99% of the sites out there, this is well within security constraints.