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Step 1: User changes email address.

Step 2: He clicks on a link to verify his new email address.

My question is simple: is he supposed to be logged in or not to verify his new email?

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  • Please elaborate -- your question is too brief / confusing. (For me at least.) A walk-though example may help. More details about your specific site would also probably help, if that's the kind of answer you're looking for. Sep 24, 2012 at 18:02
  • are you talking about a password reset or are you asking about specifically changing account info. The site I work on we do not validate emails (e-commerce) so I guess it just depends.
    – chovy
    Sep 25, 2012 at 5:36
  • User is already registered. User changes its email from the website. We need him to verify it. So we send en email. He has to click on a link provided to verify the new email address and make the change effective. Thx.
    – alesas
    Sep 25, 2012 at 10:31

1 Answer 1

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No. What you need to know is that the user has actually access to the e-mail account he claims to own, just that. It doesn't matter if the same user is logged in later or not.

Also, most users will be already logged on, since in order to change the e-mail address, they should have been logged on first.

Moreover, imagine the edge case: the user is using your web app on a device, but doesn't have (or don't want to) access to the e-mail account from this device. He uses another device to confirm the new e-mail address, but has no intention to log on from this other device.


Unrelated to UX: Technically, it's easier to not requiring log on before verification process. The first verification process (when the user registers for the first time) can't require the user to be logged on, since he can't: his account is not available until the verification process finishes. If you want to use most of the source code for the successive verification processes (when the user changes the e-mail address), don't require the user to be logged on neither.

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  • Thx MainMa, that was actually my point. I wanted to tell the tech team that it would be actually better if the user doesn't need to be logged in to verify its email address. The example you give with the user switching device makes it clear :)
    – alesas
    Sep 25, 2012 at 10:33

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