email confirmation: A "good" way to track the most recent date that a the email address we have for a registered Elgg user has been confirmed or "used"?

What are good ways to confirm the email address for all users who's email addresses have not been used or confirmed in more than n days?

  • "Confirmation" of validity of email addresses of user accounts or check of last activity of users?

    Some users might have not logged in to the site but their email is still valid while other users log in regularly but their email address is no longer valid (either they don't care or are unaware about it).

    The only validity check of emails addresses I can think of is sending a email (e.g. some kind of newsletter of announcement) to all email addresses. For any invalid email you would get a Non Delivery notice email back in your return email inbox. Depending on the number of user account and the number of invalid emails this could be quite difficult to handle though. But as Elgg does not deal with incoming emails (at least up to now) there's no way to manage the bouncing emails within Elgg itself and connect / list them for example with their corresponding user accounts.

    The "Login reminders" plugin (https://elgg.org/plugins/1181949) would check for accounts not being used in a certain time and then send out reminder emails. The plugin has been released for Elgg 1.8 though, so I don't know if it still fully works on more recent versions of Elgg. Also, it will only deal with "inactive" account which have not been used for a certain time by their users. While you can also find out about invalid emails of these account (again only by NDN mails in your inbox) you might not get all invalid emails of all site accounts as some users might still log in even with having a registered with an email address no longer valid and therefore don't get reminder emails.

  • Once the email is validated after login there's no way to ensure it remains valid other than periodic emails, but that would be annoying for user.  I'd drop any service that sent me regular "Is this still your email address?" emails.

    If you use something like sendgrid you can use webhooks to handle bounces and do something on the site for emails that bounce.  That's not something that comes with stock Elgg though, just something we've done for clients.