I run a SaaS built on Django called Subscribe Sense that integrates with ESPs to help increase confirmation rates for double opt-in mailing lists. One of the tactics we use is providing Sniper Links into people’s webmail inboxes to pull up the confirmation email. I wanted to allow users of the SaaS to use them too when verifying their email after signup, so I created a Django app and released it on PyPI.
I generate the Sniper Link by doing an MX lookup on the user’s domain to determine their mail host (that way it works for many custom GSuite and Microsoft 365 customers in addition to the normal Gmail, Yahoo etc email addresses). Then, depending on if the provider supports it, I add a search parameter to the URL to find all the emails from the sending address. (You could even go further and search by subject line, but I find that’s generally not necessary.)
The app integrates with django-allauth and provides a template tag that displays a banner if the user has an unverified email address with a sniper link to find the verification email. It also loads the sniper link data for unverified emails into the context (using the cache to avoid hitting the DB on every request), so you can use the links however you like.
At Subscribe Sense, we see approximately 40% of users who subscribe to lists that enable our Sniper Links click on them, and of those that do, 95% confirm their subscription. So I’m hopeful that they’ll help other people reduce friction for their Django app users when verifying their email address.
This is the first Django app I’ve ever released, so I’d love some feedback if you get a chance to try it out! You can find it under django-allauth-sniperlinks.