At the moment, despite the mailcheck.js check that we use for spotting obvious typos in email addresses, we still get quite a lot of bounces from user account confirmation emails, either because of typos or people entering made-up addresses. One possible solution for this is as follows:
My suggestion, instead, was to have FixMyTransport deal with the
bounces. Typically, bounces come back very quickly, so we could
note in the database on receiving one that the mail address
appears to be invalid, and display a big red notice at the top
of every page they visit on FMT saying something like "Your
email address seems to be invalid, so your problem report has
not been sent - please check it in your user profile". I think
that would deal with a large proportion of the cases where
people have a typo in their email address, or they put in a
made-up one, not realizing that will stop their problem report
from being sent. We could also arrange it so that the "wait for
your confirmation mail" page polls the server to check for that
error condition, rewriting the page to produce the big red box -
I suspect many people leave that page open for a bit.
At the moment, despite the mailcheck.js check that we use for spotting obvious typos in email addresses, we still get quite a lot of bounces from user account confirmation emails, either because of typos or people entering made-up addresses. One possible solution for this is as follows: