When to Double Opt-in

I'm a strong advocate for double opt-in, a very specific email and permission verification process. The process works by, upon receiving an email address in a signup form, sending a confirmation email out to the address, and not considering the person a subscriber unless they positively respond to the email message. (Find more detail on that here.)

Why Double Opt-in is Good For You

There are a few good reasons to do this:

• I can't sign you up for emails to annoy you. Nor can you sign me up for emails to annoy me.
• I can't script calls to your signup form to cause spam problems for you by submitting other peoples' addresses. Yep, people really do this. Not everybody gets "attacked" this way, but it really does happen, to senders big and small.
• You help weed out undeliverable addresses and typos, because people who give you the wrong address never get their confirmation email. (And hopefully, they recognize this and try again with the right address.)
• It appropriately gatekeeps controversial content until recipient desire to receive that content is confirmed.

Why Double Opt-in is Bad For You

There are a few common reasons people hate enabling this for their signups:

• More friction. Adding steps to the signup process increases chances of drop-off during the process.
• Lost confirmation emails might mean lost subscribers. If they miss your confirmation email, they miss the chance to finalize their subscription request.
• Some users are lazy, and won't go looking for, or care about, the confirmation email.
• IT'S NOT THE LAW AND YOU CAN'T MAKE ME!

I can sympathize with the concerns. I get that it's an impediment for some. I also think some people just have a bug up their rear end about that last point, and want to take a stand because Million Dollar Brand X doesn't have to implement double opt-in, they shouldn't have to, either.

A Real World Example

But when my friendly and progressive state representative, who lives about about a block from me, is posting on Facebook that somebody keeps forge subscribing her to some very non-progressive email lists, over and over, remember that the lack of double opt-in verification in this signup process is not only hurting recipients like her, it's also long term damaging to the sender. The sender, and the person submitting other peoples' email addresses might share the same politics, but neither is being a very good or ethical person. With friends like these…

Small Senders, Too

It's not just political senders, either. I pointed out back in 2023 that there was a spate of ongoing trouble where clients of various ESPs were ending up in the spam folder at a large mailbox provider due to a very complex and annoying series of disagreements or misunderstandings between the mailbox provider, a blocklist provider, and the email service provider. Email senders, especially some smaller ones, got caught in the middle. You know who avoided the pain? Those who were already using double opt-in.

Remember that when you hit the "report spam" button to denote an unwanted email message in Gmail, the sender does not get a report back to them directly. It logs a black mark, a negative reputation point, against the sender, without any notification to that sender. And it's a "boiling the frog" scenario, meaning that the reputation damage will likely build slowly over time. They might not end up in the spam folder today. Maybe not even tomorrow. But they will eventually.

It's the easy way out, and that's OK

In short; if you're a small or unsophisticated email sender (you don't have lawyers on retainer, are not a deliverability expert and don't want to have to hire one), or you're some sort of "controversial" sender (politics or other things that not everybody will like), double opt-in prevents pain in ways that benefit people like you, and you should consider it.