I am currently working on a registration based website, and I have the server sending an activation email to the user upon registration. This is all done in PHP so, as you can imagine, I am using the mail() function.
This is all fine and dandy, once the user gets the email and clicks the activation link, the ‘active’ field that is in the ‘Users’ table is set to true. Here’s the problem though, in the case that a user does not confirm their email address, what am I to do?
I have thought of holding details like the date and time the user registers but I don’t know how to proceed with this data. How do I have the server automatically delete the user from the database after a set amount of time?
That’s what I think I should be asking, but in all honesty I don’t know the usual protocol…
Conclusion: Since Cron is for Unix based servers I’ve had to pass on it, but I found it very interesting that I could just use the Windows Task Scheduler that is built into Windows. This at least means I can test it on my PC before any server hosting. Thank you all
You should definitely store the date and time that the activation link was sent.
There isn’t really a way to tell the server to automatically delete stale user data, but it’s easy enough to code up yourself. Assuming you have access to cron on your server, you can set up a cronjob to run (for example) every night at 2am and execute a PHP script that searches the database for users who were sent a link more than X days ago but never confirmed it