Summary
It is not obvious to users when they have an unverified email address. Without a verified email address, we can only send password reset notifications. We also cannot know if the user controls the email associated with the account. In this task, we'll use Echo notifications to periodically remind active users with unverified email addresses that they should confirm their email. The notification would be web and push notification for apps, as well as email.
Background
- There are approximately 200,000 users who have some amount of activity in the last 90 days, with an unverified email address
- Handling Notification Frequency: We should send the notification to every user who does not have a verified email, every ~30 days. It does not matter if the user has received the notification before. The user should not receive more than one notification on a given local wiki in 30 days.
- Multi-wiki Considerations: We should generate the notification on every wiki that shows activity for the user, using cuci_user to see where the user has been active. e.g. if a user is active on enwiki and frwiki, it is OK to generate notifications for both of those wikis.
- Opt out: The opt-out from this notification would either be verifying the email address, or unsetting the email address on the account. The user can also disable the notification in Special:Preferences (default Echo behavior)
Spec
- Category: alert
- Icon: linkSecure
- Text: Please verify your email address now
- Secondary text: Confirm your email for security purposes
- Primary action: Confirm email (link to Special:ConfirmEmail)
- Secondary action: View email preferences (link to Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-personal-email)
User story
- As an active user (active = logged-in or edited recently) I want to know if my email address is unverified.
Technical notes
- We can use the cuci_user table in centralauth to detect global user activity (logins, edits, etc) over a 90 day period.
- We can query this data via a maintenance script every 30 days and generate an Echo notification for users who have been active in the last 30 days.
Acceptance criteria
- Maintenance script exists that generates an Echo notification for users active in last 30 days who have unverified email addresses
- Links and actions match what is in the Spec section above
- Maintenance script is run every month on WMF wikis automatically
