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Comment by derefr

21 hours ago

> along the ubiquitous "please verify your account" emails with NO OPTION to click "that's NOT me, somebody misused my email"

What would you expect clicking that "wasn't me" link to do?

In 99% of cases, the user who signed up with your address already can't do any more with that account unless you positively confirm it was you; and the site also won't send you any more email because they don't consider the email verified (and so sending to it might result in their emails getting sent to spam -> their email-sending reputation score going down.) So things are already in the state you'd want them to be in, no?

The only problem I can think of with that state is that now you can't sign up "fresh" for an account with the same provider, because now there's already an account associated with your email address sitting there in their DB in the pending-email-verification state. (But you still can acquire that account, by clicking "forgot/reset password" and going through that flow, which will inevitably go through your email, as anything like a 2FA setup flow always waits behind email verification.)

> and the site also won't send you any more email because they don't consider the email verified

Netflix, for one, didn't do this. They kept allowing this guy to "resend his confirmation email" periodically over several months (I never had a Netflix account).

My theory is that it was an affiliate scam of some sort; someone probably got paid for everyone who signed up with his code. So he "signed up" thousands of random mails in the hope that some of them would click through on the "you're almost ready to start your Netflix journey!" mail and actually subscribe to Netflix.