Email verification overview

While integrating with Stytch's Passwords product, it's good practice to implement a flow that either allows or requires your users to verify their email addresses during signup.

Email verification isn't strictly required in order to use our Passwords product, but we strongly recommend doing so. There are many reasons why email verification is considered best practice, including:

• Reducing the number of fraudulent accounts: It's harder for bad actors to create fake accounts if they're required to verify the email address that they use to sign up for your application.
• Reducing the number of mistyped email addresses: If your users are required to verify their email addresses upon signup, you can be confident that they'll receive any future email communications from you.
• Preventing an account takeover vector: Stytch automatically deduplicates accounts by email address, but we can only safely do so without requiring a password reset if the user's email address has already been verified. Otherwise, a fraudulent actor could create an account using an email address that they do not own and then gain access to the legitimate owner of that email address's account should the legitimate owner sign up via an email-based authentication method in the future. We also do not allow the addition of a new email address to an existing Stytch User with an unverified email address in order to prevent this same account takeover vector.

In summary, we believe that requiring email verification is the right choice for most applications, and not doing so will limit certain Stytch functionality like automatic account deduplication and the ability to add new email addresses to existing accounts.

To determine whether or not a user's email address has been verified, check the verified value inside the emails array in our Get User endpoint response:

"emails": [
  {
    "email_id": "email-test-81bf03a8-86e1-4d95-bd44-bb3495224953",
    "email": "test@example.com",
    "verified": true
  }
]

Stytch email verification logic is flexible, so you can customize your email verification flow to fit the specific needs of your application.

Any authentication flow where the user proves ownership of their email address can be used to verify your Stytch Users' email addresses. This includes our Email Magic Links, Email OTP, and OAuth products (as long as the OAuth provider itself guarantees email verification). Successful completion of our Password reset by email flow will also cause email addresses to be marked as verified.

Check out our Email verification before password creation and Email verification after password creation implementation guides that will introduce you to two different email verification flows and will provide step-by-step implementation instructions for each.