Hi,
On my site I don’t require members to sign up / log in. Instead I have a form where users can submit their email address to get a weekly newsletter. Their emails will be stored by a third party mailer, which will also handle the newsletter.
How can I disable the confirmation email?
Any help here would be great, thanks
Joe
To fight spam and respect users’ inboxes, it’s not possible to disable the confirmation email.
If you’re using a separate email service, you could disable Portal signups altogether and use a sign-up form from the third-party mailer instead – if that works…
Similar question: Is there a way to configure to disable “Subscription confirmation email” step, lots of my newsletter customers complained that they clicked the subscribe button on website but always forgot to click the system email in their inbox to double confirm. I understand the concern about spam, but it might be. a redundant step for group of people and newsletter platform. Are we flexible enough to provide newsletter owners an option to simplify their subscriber’s user experience, consider it as customer obsession. Thanks.
@RyanF I completely understand the importance of respecting user’s inboxes and fighting spam. However, I believe there’s a critical aspect to consider here: user experience and lead conversion.
People receive numerous emails daily, and it’s quite easy for a confirmation email to be overlooked or forgotten. If users don’t confirm within 24 hours, the link expires, leading them to repeat the entire process – most people would just give up if they have to go back to their email multiple times just to confirm.
Would it be possible to consider adding the auto-confirm options within the ghost admin ? we could choose if we want to automatically add free signups or not. Similar to Convertkit.
Or at the very least, either send us a notification email of someone who attempted to sign up. Or display people who have signed up for the newsletter but not yet confirmed in the admin dashboard. This would allow us to follow up with a customized reminder email that might be more effective than the default confirmation email sent by Ghost. The % of people who sign up and confirm vs just sign up is much smaller and it would be nice for us to know that difference.
I was using convertkit for my newsletter for a short time and I had turned on the option to double opt in users. About 80% of the people who signed up did not confirm their emails, but you get to see that in your dashboard and then make some business decisions. I switched to ghost because I like the product.
Please consider at least sending ghost admins a notification email for people who have signed up.
I totally get your point but it would be great to have the users decide for themselves. It feels a bit like training wheel on a bike when the company wants to protect me. However, I am old enough and when I use Ghost as a website platform but decide to send my newsletter with Beehiive, I want to decide which service sends the confirmation email. Imagine Beehiiv would handle it the same or any other service out there. It would be a flood of confirmation emails and totally distract the user. And to be honest, I prefer to have a button than I can switch on an off than fiddle around in HTML or whatnot to implement signup forms from Beehiiv into Ghost :) Thanks!
How is it spam or not respecting their inboxes when they entered their emails? It’s widely known that double opt in greatly reduces subs including people who wanted to but met too much friction.
Did you find a solution here? I’m also using Beehiiv newsletter and want to avoid the Welcome email from Ghost which is unnecessary.
If you’re importing the users, they don’t get an email.
Same issue. Using Beehiiv.
Not having control of sending emails is annoying.
Has this thread totally gone dark from the Ghost team? I completely understand the need to fight spam (especially given the fact that all emails are coming from @ghost.io emails), so the more people “opt in,” the safer the email delivery is for everyone.
But right now, there is NO visibility into whether people are signing up and then failing to receive and/or click the verification email. I’ve been messaged several times saying “Well, crap, I never noticed it went to spam. You might want to remind people who signed up…” (well, the site tells them in the moment… but the admin panel doesn’t keep a record of them).
In the absence of being able to disable it (trust me, I get it), how about we at least get some admin functionality and reporting of signups without verifications?
Joining the conversation here…
It has come to my attention that at least 5 people have had the newsletter confirmation email go to spam.
These are only the 5 people who had told me personally they signed up, and so I knew to follow up with them to see what happened.
My top of funnel right now is social media, so I fear that there are many more people who have tried to sign up, but never clicked confirm, and I have no way of knowing.
Is there a way to disable the confirmation email?
Is there a way to create a simple input box where people enter their emails and I can manually add them to skip the confirmation process?
Can Ghost update its UX with signups to be more like Substack? I’m at the point where the friction for growth is so huge, I’m considering jumping platforms.
This is critical for me. The double opt-in is a huge barrier to legitimate sign-ups, especially that they are ending up in spam!
I also would like some way to see if someone has requested a magic link and hasn’t clicked it. I’m not sure there’s anything actionable to be done there, but I’d be curious to know how often it happens that someone enters their address and doesn’t confirm. [Since I self host, I guess I could go look in the database. I’m not sure I’m quite that curious…]
I don’t know of a way to disable double opt-in without hacking at the Ghost core. It really is best-practice, and protects you from getting hit from spam sign-ups that result in spam complaints and loss of domain reputation. I wrote more about it in the article linked above.
At the risk of self-promotion, I’ll point out that I offer social-sign on as a free-or-cheap service for Ghost sites. That allows your users to get logged in without leaving your site, since it lets the third party site (i.e. Google, facebook, etc) be responsible for having a valid email for your users, so they don’t have to go click a link. It fixes a lot of the friction around magic link sign-in.
You could certainly stand up a form somewhere that lets people put in their emails, and you later add them to Ghost. Adding a member directly in the admin panel (or via the API) does not trigger a magic link, and creates a user who will receive email, if you create them with one or more newsletter subscriptions turned on. You could even build some automation to create the accounts, BUT you’re back to being susceptible to attacks from spammers. Remember the thing from a couple months back where Ghost had to add email domain blacklists because people were getting spam sign-ups and getting in trouble with mailgun? Something like that would be a target. ‘Can’ isn’t the same as ‘should’.
Story time! I’m helping out someone moving from Mailchimp. His list has grown this year from 2500 to 5000, while on Maiilchimp. Then we looked at the list. The geography of his sign-ups didn’t make sense for a local news site. And a lot of them had names like aTkqHyIuM. He cleaned the list… and now he is right back to where he was last year. What looked like really good growth was actually all bogus sign ups.
True story. Double opt in continues to be a really good idea.