alt Hacker NewsI can tell you, from personal experience, that the vast majority of sites still don't bother to send a Confirmation Email before allowing you to create an account.
I have a gmail address that I secured back in 2004 which is fairly short in length. Multiple people other than myself have used that email to sign up for all sorts of things which never bothered to confirm that the user actually owned the account before happily signing them up. AWS accounts, hotel sites, innumerable soccer and fantasy-football related sites, etc.
Every time I would try to reach out to the service to tell them that I had never signed up for an account as the email holder, they would give me the same non-answer: "Well if you own the email account, just reset your password and then delete it!" Nope. Not doing that. It was their negligence that allowed the account to be created under my email in the first place. I am not going to acknowledge ownership of the account to cover their fuck-up.
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THIS! THIS! THIS!
I cannot believe that in 2026 companies can get away with not confirming your email address. So damn annoying…and apparently something that can get YOU into legal jeopardy. Could we use this case as class-action precedent to sue a few large companies and get them to change?
Make sure to report the emails as spam. They might actually wake up once their marketing slop stops being delivered to gmail inboxes.
Want to hear a fun one? You can get realtors to spam any (US) phone number you want by entering it into Zillow for like a rental or something. They do no verification whatsoever.