The warning that does not depend on your inbox
· TinyX · 2 min read
Here is a problem that took us longer to see clearly than it should have.
If you sign up and never confirm your email address, we remind you by email. If the address is still unconfirmed a couple of days later, the account is removed. That is a sensible policy for keeping junk signups out of a file-sharing service, and it has one glaring flaw: the warning travels down the exact channel that is in doubt. Mistype one letter of your address and the reminder goes to somebody who isn't you, or to nowhere at all. You find out when the account is gone.
As of this release, the warning lives somewhere you cannot miss it.
A banner, on every page, with a date on it
Sign in with an unconfirmed address and every page in TinyX now carries a notice at the top. It names the address we actually have on file — which is the whole point, because a typo is only obvious once you see it written down — and it gives the date and time the account would be removed if nothing changes.
That time is stated in UTC, and it says UTC. We could have printed "03:00" and left you to work out whose three in the morning we meant, which in practice would have handed some people most of an extra day they didn't have.
You can fix the address yourself
Go to Account → Account email. Enter your password, enter the right address, and a fresh confirmation goes out to it straight away.
Until you follow the link in that mail, the new address counts as unconfirmed — we don't simply take your word for it, which is the entire reason a confirmation step exists at all. So the banner stays up, now showing a new deadline, and clears the moment you confirm. Anything still sitting in the old inbox stops being useful the instant you make the change.
If you've confirmed before, none of this applies to you
Worth saying plainly, because it is the case we most wanted to get right: an established account that confirmed an address at some point and later mistyped a new one is in no danger here. Once you have shown you can receive mail at an address, the removal policy is done with you — permanently, not until the next slip.
And your receipts follow you
On a paid plan, confirming a new address also moves your billing email, so invoices and payment notices turn up in the same inbox as everything else rather than the one you just left behind.
None of this is thrilling. It is the sort of thing nobody notices until it isn't there, usually at the worst possible moment — which is a fair description of most of the work we are proudest of.