Email confirmation: why imported contacts get nothing until they click

An address that lands in your club's records from a spreadsheet is an assertion by whoever prepared that spreadsheet. It is not evidence that anyone at that inbox wants email from your club. And the platform will not treat it as evidence. Every imported address arrives unconfirmed, and the send engine refuses to deliver anything to an unconfirmed address until somebody at that inbox proves it is theirs.

This is what stands between a member roster and a mailing list, and it is why a new club can be given a real trial without the platform becoming a way to blast a purchased list.

Everything member-facing: campaigns and newsletters, dues notices and receipts, renewal reminders, camp and lap confirmations, workflow email, ticket replies. Not "marketing only": everything.

Two things still go to an unconfirmed address, because both are how an address stops being unconfirmed:

• The confirmation email itself.

• A sign-in link or household invitation. A message whose entire content is a link that only the inbox's owner can use.

A blocked send is not silently dropped. It writes a message-log row with status blocked and the reason "email address not confirmed", visible on the household's timeline and in campaign and workflow run detail. The same visibility quiet mode gives you.

Only proof that someone opened that inbox:

A family member's address (someone in the household without their own login) can only be proved the first way. There is no sign-in for them to make.

Two more states exist for provenance, and neither is proof: self-serve (the person typed the address into your club's own public join or newsletter form) and grandfathered (the addresses already on the platform when this feature shipped: those clubs were not silenced).

Staff cannot confirm an address on a member's behalf. There is no button for it, anywhere, on purpose: "an admin says this address is fine" is exactly the assertion an abusive import would make. If a member insists their address is right, re-send the confirmation email or have them sign in once.

Three places send the confirmation email without you pressing anything, each because an address just arrived that nobody has proved:

• The public join form. An applicant is asked to confirm the moment they apply: they're at the keyboard, so it costs them one click. Where an application fee is configured, that click is also the payment step: the form stops at "Check your email", the confirmation email's button reads "Confirm and pay $X", and clicking it confirms the address and opens Stripe Checkout. The club never takes a fee from an address it cannot reach afterwards. An applicant who already confirmed (or signed in) skips the round trip and goes straight to payment as before. Free applications work the same minus the payment step: the acknowledgement is held until they click, and their position is on their portal home either way.

• Changing a member's sign-in email. The new address is one staff typed, so it gets the "is this you?" request rather than the changed-address notice. The old address still gets the notice. That's the half that matters if the change wasn't authorized. A typo therefore reaches a stranger as a single question with a "not me" link, instead of that stranger quietly inheriting a member's club mail.

• Provisioning a portal login from a household's People tab. The people who need that button are usually the ones an import created, so giving them an account also asks their address to prove itself.

• Turning on "copy me on household email." A second adult, or a family member's address, only starts receiving copies once that address is confirmed: so ticking the box sends the ask. Family members matter most here: they have no login, so the emailed link is the only thing that can ever prove their address.

None of these re-asks an address that has already confirmed or already said "not me", and none will send a second copy within six hours. Saving a form twice does not mean two emails.

If copies aren't arriving, My household in the member portal says so under the copy checkbox: "Copies are paused until <address> is confirmed." That is the answer to "I ticked the box and nothing came."

The ask is a deliberate, separate click, not part of applying an import. So you can import, look at the results, fix the file, and re-import as many times as you need without a single member hearing from the system.

On Admin › Member import, under the batch report, the Email confirmation card shows, for the last batch: how many addresses are confirmed, never asked, asked but not yet clicked, and how many said "not me": plus the org-wide pending count when other batches are still outstanding.

• Send confirmation emails. Asks only the addresses that have never been asked. Clicking it twice does not email anybody twice.

• Re-send to everyone who hasn't confirmed: the follow-up pass, including people already asked once. Each re-send mints a fresh link and retires the previous one, so the most recent email is always the one that works.

Sending is queued and works through the batch in chunks; reload the page to watch the confirmed count climb. Links are good for 30 days and are single-use.

The intro line of that email is yours: set Confirmation email intro in Settings ("We've moved to a new member system…"). Leave it empty for a neutral default naming the club.

Importing is a one-off; chasing the stragglers takes weeks. Open Email confirmations from the dashboard's Email confirmations card, or search for it (Cmd-K). That is the page for this part, and it is where you will spend the time.

It opens with the number that matters. "412 of 600 confirmed": broken into confirmed, not asked yet, asked with no answer, and said "not me". Below that is the list: every address the club still cannot reach, with the person's name, their household, when they were last asked and how many times, longest silence first. That is a call list.

• Ask everyone who hasn't confirmed re-sends to all of them at once.

• Ask again on any single row re-sends to just that person. The one you have on the phone.

• Download the list (CSV) gives you the whole thing to work offline: name, household, email, status, last asked, times asked. The on-screen list stops at 500; the download does not.

A row that says "not me" has no button. Nobody at the club can undo that. See below.

Reminders are off by default, and both settings must be set before anything happens:

• Confirmation reminder, every N days, how long to wait after the last ask before asking again.

• Confirmation reminder, stop after N asks, the most confirmation emails any one address will ever receive, counting the first.

With both set, the nightly job asks again on that schedule and stops at the maximum, so a member who never answers is not chased forever. It only ever re-asks somebody you have already asked once. The first ask stays your deliberate act, never the system's.

They are off by default on purpose. An unasked-for reminder to somebody who already ignored one is how a club ends up marked as spam, and how often to chase your own members is your judgment, not ours. A club migrating a roster in a hurry might set 7 days and 3 asks; a club with time might set 14 and 2.

1. They fill in the join form and submit. Nothing is charged, and the form says so before they submit.

2. The page leads with the state of play in one line. "You have not been charged, and you are not on the waitlist yet": then explains that the emailed link does both. The application and its unpaid fee invoice exist behind the scenes, but nothing is promised to them yet.

3. The email repeats it (subject: "Confirm your email to complete your application"), and its button, Confirm and pay $X, confirms the address and opens secure card payment. The page that link lands on says it a third time before the button.

4. Paying assigns their waitlist position, exactly as before, and the receipt and position email now deliver because the address is confirmed.

The "not yet" line is repeated at every step: an applicant who closes the tab believing they are done is the one failure this flow can produce, and staff would hear about it weeks later as "I applied and never heard back."

Free applications say the opposite where it's true: the applicant is on the list, and the nudge only tells them the club can't email them, including when a spot opens, until they confirm.

If they never click, they have an unpaid application, which expires on the usual schedule (configured in Settings); re-submitting the form picks up the same invoice and re-sends the link. If Stripe can't be opened at step 3 the confirmation still stands. They're told to sign in and pay, and nothing was charged.

Expect this step to cost you some applicants who would otherwise have paid on impulse. That is the trade: in exchange, every fee you collect comes from an address the club can reach about the application it just paid for.

The confirmation email carries a second link for exactly this. It does not act on the click: it opens a page that spells out what the decline stops, all club email to that address, bills and receipts included, says that nobody at the club can reverse it, and asks a second time before anything is recorded. That second step exists because the button used to sit next to the primary one and act immediately, which is one stray tap on a phone away from cutting a household off from its own bills.

Once recorded, the decline also adds the address to the club's do-not-email list, so a later import that re-creates the person does not start mailing them again.

If it turns out to be a mistake, the person undoes it themselves by signing in with that address. Proof from the inbox outranks an earlier "not me", and signing in lifts both the decline and the do-not-email entry it wrote. It does not touch a bounce, a complaint, an unsubscribe, or a block you added yourself; those stand on their own. There is still no staff path, and there will not be one: "an admin says this address is fine" is the assertion this whole feature exists to refuse. What you can do is tell them to sign in.

• Quiet mode and confirmation are different gates and stack: a provisioning org sends nothing at all, and after go-live it still sends nothing to unconfirmed addresses.

• Expect a meaningful share never to click. That is real information about your roster's deliverability. Those addresses would have been bounces or spam complaints. Work them from the Email confirmations list: check for typos, ask at the front desk, or let a sign-in confirm them.

• The count climbs on its own once the season opens. A member who follows a sign-in link and pays their dues has confirmed themselves without ever opening a confirmation email. Both the import card and the Email confirmations page say so, and so does the confirmation email itself, so a member who has already signed in is not chasing a second click.

• Members you add one at a time, an invitation to a second adult, a login you provision, an email you correct, are asked individually as described above, so the batch send is only ever about imported rosters.