OT: Non-idempotent links in e-mail?

rubyonrails-talk
1

I'm writing some login/registration code that will send an activation e-mail to a user's address.

The easy way to do it is to send a standard HREF link, which nearly any modern mail reader will pick up on (and which can be cut and pasted if need be).

However, an activation URL is not idempotent, and so in theory it oughta be a POST link. But there's no good way to send a POST link in e-mail! I'm not sure if mail clients will process a form in HTML e-mail (or if they even should), but it's certainly not cut-and-pasteable for those without HTML mail readers.

Anyone found a satisfactory solution to this?

Jay Levitt

2

Link to a confirmation and post from there?

jeremy

3

Hmmm... works technically, but I'm not sure about the user experience there. Click here to activate your account, click here to REALLY activate your account...

Sigh.

Jay

4

Anyone found a satisfactory solution to this?

Link to a confirmation and post from there?

Hmmm... works technically, but I'm not sure about the user experience there. Click here to activate your account, click here to REALLY
activate your account...

Sigh.

Linking to a confirmation form is pretty standard and most users will
have seen it before. In our application we go a step further and
require them to click on the link in the email message then type in
the password that was in the email. This is an attempt to avoid
people guessing at urls and getting access without at least having
access to the email address.

Cheers, Bob