You just add a BOOL field "activated" to the user records, then in the email give them a url that contains:

(a) Their user name or ID
(b) A timestamp at which the URL expires
(c) A hash code based off their user name and/or password hash, the timestamp, and some internal site key

All you need for this is your standard database module and Digest::MD5.

Asim: I don't really see how making a separate table for just the authentication process is going to help much. Nobody's going to bother trying to brute-force an MD5 key, and if they're just spamming your site to shut it down (or because they're an automatic script), they're almost certainly going to spam the user signup rather than the user authentication. Either everything should be in one table for the sake of simplicity (and records accessed by ID) or the entire registration record should be in the temp table, and only moved to the primary table once it's been activated.

In reply to Re: Easy Account Email Verification by TedPride
in thread Easy Account Email Verification by debiandude

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.