Low friction intelligent email verification for bookers

[alexbit-codemod]

Is your proposal related to a problem?

several times, the booker misspelled their email and the invite didnt show up in their calendar and missed the meeting.
my mac calendar misguided me by showing a green checkmark that the person has accepted the invite, while that email does not even exist.

Describe the solution you'd like

i'd like to propose an optional feature where the cal owner can turn on to ask booker to provide their email twice to ensure they have not mis-spelled it. other intelligent (but might not be perfect) solutions could be to check for misspelling of popular domains... (e.g. just today someone booked a meeting and provided ...@gmaiml.com address)

Describe alternatives you've considered

i understand the there is a high-friction feature where booker needs to confirm their email (great feature for its use cases).
but it creates a lot of friction for users.

[PeerRich]

should this be using an online service or just a hardcoded list of common email providers and do a fuzzy compare?

i.e.:

gmail.com, yahoomail.com, hey.com, etc.?

[alexbit-codemod]

Solution 1: hardcode top 20 email domains and validate against that list for typos. If typo, don't let the booker move forward with the booking.

Solution 2: send confirmation to booker. If bounced, notify the other cal user.

Solution 3: if the feature turned on, booker needs to provide email twice to confirm.

They all have pros and cons and you can have them all at the same time.

[artseabra]

I like Solution 2 more than the others.
With nice ux copy, the payoff is worth the slight friction, if turned on by cal owner.
This looks like its live am i right? Came here looking to find out what the ux of "Requires booker email verification" looked like. Open source is cool!

[alexbit-codemod]

With nice ux copy, the payoff is worth the slight friction, if turned on by cal owner.

My proposed solution was NOT to introduce friction for booker. My solution was to check if the confirmation email (not verification) to booker gets returned and if it does, cal just notify the owner that hey someone wanted to book you but they provided the wrong email.

[jaitjacob]

Hi, Would the following be an acceptable fix for this issue?

It can be dealt on the client side. When a checkbox stating 'Confirm booker email twice?' is enabled on the 'Event Setup' page, the Booker will be asked to enter the email twice and be able to confirm booking ONLY IF if Email Address & Confirmed Email Address match.

1. A checkbox that says 'Ask booker to confirm their email twice' default is unchecked.
   
2. If 'Ask booker to confirm their email twice' checkbox is enabled, Booker will be shown a field that says 'Confirm email address' as follows,
   

Edit: changing Checkbox label as per @alexbit-codemod 's suggestion.

[alexbit-codemod]

That's a good one. Suggestion: "Confirm bookers email twice" might suggest that the cal owner should confirm that. Instead say: "Ask booker to confirm their email twice"

[alexbit-codemod]

Also, is there any way for you guys to count how many times your confirmation emails get bounced? If yes, then after launching this feature, you can compare the bounce rate of emails and objectively measure the impact of your work. Imagine each day hundreds of human errors, lots of back and forth headaches are saved thanks to this feature.

[alexbit-codemod]

Adding more user-facing features comes at a cost of making the product a bit more complex. Also asking bookers to provide email twice is a little bit of friction. But if data shows that it can prevent many mistakes then it makes sense to build this feature.

But non-user-facing features that do the magic in the back, like checking if there is a typo in the domain name, does not add complexity to user experience (but we might not be able to cover all edge cases). Again looking at the data of bounced back emails can help. If 80% of bounces are due to domain name misspelling then I'd just build the non-user-facing feature.

[Parship999]

Working on it