Email for confirmation and validation

[RRinTetons]

On a lot of sites when you join a group or request a product or service an email is generated with a unique key and sent to the user. The user must click a link in the email to be directed to a web site where they may be prompted to enter the unique key or perform some other authentication task.

Does anyone have a link to a tutorial or an example of how this is done? I want to shoehorn it into an existing web site if possible - the site runs on IIS and uses a LOT of .NET and C#, so those kinds of examples would be best. The emails are sent from the data server behind the web site, and there are a lot of services already being managed there.

Of course, I'm not a fan of wheel reinventing, so if there's a product out there that I can buy completed and use I'll look at that option, too.

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Richard Ray
Jackson Hole Mountain Resort

 

[jbenson001]

There may be something out there pre-built, but this is very easy to impliment yourself. I don't have specific code examples, but we do it on our site.
A user can register by entering some info and an email address. Once we get the email address, we generate our own email with a link that contains an enctryped query string with a "confirmation" value. If the person clicks the link, they go to a page on our site that deccrypts the qs and updates the DB to show that the person has a valid email account. From there, the user can now login and use the features that require a logon.

 

[jmeckley]

here is a common way most high volume sites handle the scenario:

http://ayende.com/Blog/archive/2009/02/22/solving-problems-with-messaging-creating-a-new-user.aspx

Jason Meckley
Programmer
Specialty Bakers, Inc.

faq855-7190