Here's another thought, just off the top of my head: get people to sign up by sending an email to "subscribe@example.com". You can include that as a "mailto:" link and many browsers will deal with it correctly.
There's very good odds that the email they send will have their "From:" (or "Reply-To:") address correctly set. Then just have an email autoresponder which emails them back a link with a token in it, when they click on that it'll take them to a page to create their account, with their email address already filled in by the token.
Yeah, maybe. But you're going to have to send them there some time to do the "confirm email" thing, I was just thinking perhaps get that over and done with upfront.
Ideally, all this would be done away with by OpenID or client-side certificates or something along those lines. The whole password-and-email-in-case-you-forget-it paradigm is broken, really.
Comments
Here's another thought, just off the top of my head: get people to sign up by sending an email to "subscribe@example.com". You can include that as a "mailto:" link and many browsers will deal with it correctly.
There's very good odds that the email they send will have their "From:" (or "Reply-To:") address correctly set. Then just have an email autoresponder which emails them back a link with a token in it, when they click on that it'll take them to a page to create their account, with their email address already filled in by the token.
Sending people to their emailclient would probably decrease conversion too much.
Yeah, maybe. But you're going to have to send them there some time to do the "confirm email" thing, I was just thinking perhaps get that over and done with upfront.
Ideally, all this would be done away with by OpenID or client-side certificates or something along those lines. The whole password-and-email-in-case-you-forget-it paradigm is broken, really.