don't make me wait

it's 2025, after signing up for an app or website with your e-mail address, you wait to receive the "verify your account" message in your e-mail inbox. you keep refreshing your inbox, the message arrives about two minutes later. why is this not instant?

an easy case to make for why it should be instant comes from the world of e-commerce. we know that even milliseconds of delay in your software lower customer retention and satisfaction, thus lowering company revenue. what makes the waiting-for-confirmation-mail problem even weirder is the fact that software companies invest heavily in generating new user sign-ups.

okay, i want to make a second point, not from the world of e-commerce, but from the world of ancient, old school commerce: banking. banks understand that the most valuable customer behavior (opening a new account) deserves massive optimization, even when it seems inefficient:

Banks have extremely weird behaviors by the standards of parking engineers; the typical user behavior is to stop in for only a few minutes but the behavior the bank wants to optimize for, new account opening, can take half an hour to several hours. Through what turns out to be a simple result of queuing theory, bank branches end up with a lot of parking that appears mostly underutilized almost all of the time, and this is close to optimal.

excerpt from the excellent patio11 article.

okay, i hope to have made my case of why it should be instant. now the question remains why clearly companies don't care about making it instant. i remember back in 2005, 20 years ago, being annoyed by this. maybe it is like daylight saving time? everyone hates the thing, and clearly we should do better here, but since it's a once and done thing people don't complain long enough for the problem to be fixed? maybe we rely on the "stay signed in" button too much? i don't know. anyway, to all people designing an e-mail confirmation service, please speed it up. don't make me wait.