Question

I’m developing a website with using struts2 and jsp pages. In many sites after you sign-up, a link will be sent to your email and after clicking on that the registration is complete. I want this feature on my webstie, but I don’t have any idea how to do this and how is this working? Should I save user’s information on my database until he/she is verified or not? I searched web but there is learning for php forms.

any tutorial?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

The algorithm is something like this:

1. Save the user’s info, marking it with a pending status.
2. Generate a token that contains some info
   related to the user’s account.
3. Generate the email, which must
   include the URL to activate the
   account and the URL will have the
   token in it.
4. The URL must point to
   some servlet or service in your app
   that will validate the token, check
   if the user related to the token is
   inactive, present a completion form
   (let the user set a password,
   present a captcha, etc) and on form
   submission you activate the account
   with the password they set.
5. You should periodically scan the
   inactivate accounts and delete the
   ones that are several days old and
   have not been activated.

To generate the token, you can encrypt some data such as user ID, email, etc and encode it in Base 64 (the URL-safe variant) – remember to salt it when you encrypt. When you receive the token, you decode and decrypt it, and it must point to an inactivate user account.