Help:Email confirmation

This help page is a how-to guide. It details processes or procedures of some aspect(s) of Wikipedia's norms and practices. It is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, and may reflect varying levels of consensus and vetting.

Shortcut H:ECON

Wikipedia requires that users confirm their email addresses before they can use email features such as emailing users, receiving email notifications, and the ability to reset your password. This helps to prevent problems with bad addresses or spam. You only need to confirm email addresses to use the email system; you can log in and edit pages without confirming your address. You are not even required to enter an email address to register; it is optional. (However, administrators are expected to have a confirmed email address.)

Status

You can check your address confirmation status in your preferences. If your account was registered prior to March 2, 2006 (when confirmation was enforced), your existing address (if any) has not been automatically confirmed. If you change your email address, you will automatically be sent a new confirmation email.

How to confirm

1. From your preferences, go to the section entitled User profile, and scroll down to Email options, if desired check the box next to Enable email from other users.
2. Click the button in that section; an email will be sent to your email address with a confirmation link. If you see no link, go to Special:ConfirmEmail. If that page starts with "Your email address was confirmed on <date>", then you're already confirmed.
3. When you receive the email, click the link it contains to confirm that you own the email address.

Known issues

• MediaWiki does not verify that email addresses are properly formatted when they are stored in the database (see phab:T24449). Users should verify that their email address is functional before entering it.
• Some email programs may divide the confirmation link into two lines. If that happens, please copy all parts of the link together into the browser address bar.
• If you do not receive the confirmation email, check with your mail provider and mail software to see if the message was blocked as "spam". If you cannot receive the mail with your normal mail service then you can try another, for example one of the free
  webmails in comparison of webmail providers
  .
• If you do not receive the confirmation email, but your email seems to work otherwise, check with your mail provider to see whether they have used an IP address in their domain MX record, instead of a domain name, as required by rfc 1035, section 3.3.9. On the web, you can use mxtoolbox.com. On Linux, you can check using dig, and ensuring that the rightmost column in the ANSWER SECTION is a domain name and not an IP address. For example, gmail.com is OK here:

$ dig gmail.com mx

; <<>> DiG 9.6.2-P1-RedHat-9.6.2-2.P1.fc11 <<>> gmail.com mx
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 51836
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 5, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;gmail.com.            IN    MX

;; ANSWER SECTION:
gmail.com.        1912    IN    MX    40 alt4.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
gmail.com.        1912    IN    MX    5 gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
gmail.com.        1912    IN    MX    10 alt1.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
gmail.com.        1912    IN    MX    20 alt2.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
gmail.com.        1912    IN    MX    30 alt3.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.

;; Query time: 15 msec
;; SERVER: 24.29.103.15#53(24.29.103.15)
;; WHEN: Fri Apr 23 02:24:50 2010
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 150