Discussion on: There's only one way to validate an email address

Until bots start clicking on emails. Then we're gonna have a whole new issue... But so far I don't think there are bots that will

create a fake email address
sign up for your thing, and then
access that email address and click on the link

It's not my proudest moment, but I once had to write a bot that did exactly that, as well as solving CAPTCHAs in order to post ads on classifieds sites. It's not that hard to do, and there are a bunch of services out there that will provide you with rotating IP adresses, rotating e-mail adresses that all forward to your server, and even captcha solving.

So never assume that because you send a validation e-mail it's a human that registered the account and clicked the validation link.

I completely agree with the rest of the article though !