Occurence of mistyped emails on registration

[ryanfeeley]

Today when registering my bazillionth Firefox Account, I mistyped my email address and realized I’d hit a dead end.

Is this happening enough to warrant a more sophisticated “Undo” function that would allow the user to delete the account after a subsequent confirmation screen?

What to look for:

1. Users who provide emails that bounce back
2. Users who provide emails but never verify them
3. Users who go back from Email Sent and register with a different email

[kparlante]

Repeating here for posterity:

1. Around 7% of new accounts created have email addresses that bounce (and are then deleted).
   https://kibana.fxa.us-west-2.prod.mozaws.net/index.html#dashboard/temp/SxdtXXQTSE6Jm-s8-frbzw
2. Historically ~85% of accounts created are verified. Recently the daily verification rate is a few percentage points lower:
   https://metrics.services.mozilla.com/accounts-dashboard/flow/
3. A very quick and dirty search on the client metrics shows ~2% of users who get the confirm screen go directly back to signup. This one's the least accurate, I'll update if I figure out a better query.

Note that the verification rate numbers are from the database, not from logs, so they do not count deleted accounts. Presumably the email addresses for the created-but-not-verified accounts in the database are "good", that is, they didn't bounce and they passed our verification test.

[kparlante]

Client metrics query: https://kibana.fxa.us-west-2.prod.mozaws.net/#dashboard/temp/Wg0bcyxbQ8-mfIQhz_8vFg

[ckarlof]

Is this happening enough to warrant a more sophisticated “Undo” function that would allow the user to delete the account after a subsequent confirmation screen?

Accounts where the email bounced are deleted automatically.

[ryanfeeley]

Accounts where the email bounced are deleted automatically.

That will likely cover the majority of them, although many of the mistyped emails will exist, just not belong to the user. Today I typed in ryan@gmail.com when I meant to type in ryan@ryanfeeley.com. So ryan@gmail.com got an email, and I'd like to undo that account creation if I can. Might be 2%? Well over 100,000 instances based on our numbers.

[kparlante]

Random idea: create a specific action that either ryan@gmail or ryan@ryanfeeley could take, that didn't necessarily delete the account (assuming that allowing unverified users to delete accounts is a problem) but indicated to us that something is amiss. One "oops wrong account" link on the email sent confirmation screen and one link on the verification email. Or perhaps that's a can of worms.

[ryanfeeley]

And if 7% of emails bounce, typos are a problem. Should we escalate: #871
@ckarlof?

[ckarlof]

Plenty of followup actions here.