Show unconfirmed email addresses in the preferences tab

Question

The email for getting notifications can be changed by clicking the "preferences" tab in your profile. After entering a new email address, the "Save email settings" button becomes clickable:

Clicking the button turns it grey:

So all looks well. But if you don't confirm the email by clicking on the link sent to your email inbox, the next time you go back to the preferences, you will see your old email address with no indication that it changed.

You can subscribe to the weekly newsletter from the "edit" tab of your profile. If you click the option and save, the next time you visit the edit page before confirming your email you get this message:

Once you confirm the email, the resend link disappears so you know the subscription is set up:

Ideally, the two systems would be unified so that all email subscriptions happen the same way. But short of that, it would be very helpful to indicate that an email address is unconfirmed for notification emails just like newsletters.

Answer 1

We've been getting quite a few emails regarding this, of users being absolutely confused about why their settings are not updating. Unless they have notifications for new emails like I do, they're not going to know that there's some magical link in an email sitting inside their inbox. Nothing told them to look there. There's no instructions anywhere on that page that say they will have to confirm the new email address they enter.

It seems like there are a couple of simple things that could be done to achieve this:

1. Upon clicking the Save button, if they changed their email, display a popup message informing them that the changed email will need to be verified and that they should check their inbox.

2. When viewing the page while a confirmation email is still pending, include a message above the form that indicates they attempted to change their email recently and that the confirmation is still pending, preferably with a resend link like in the right sidebar (image in your question).

Answer 2

This will be implemented in build 3933 in MSE/MSO, and 3039 on other sites.

The two systems are still not unified, so the pending-verification email addresses are not actually synced up between the two systems, but there is some sort of pending verification setting now.