Implementing the right Email Verification flow

Email verification, despite being a contentious step that adds friction to user onboarding, is crucial for maintaining effective communication channels, preventing fake accounts, and preserving a company's marketing reputation. It provides a direct line to users for essential communications such as billing documents and password resets, and helps eliminate fake accounts that can skew data analytics and increase server costs. Verification is also important for preventing unauthorized account linking and ensuring emails are not blacklisted due to hard bounces. Implementing a balanced verification process involves deciding whether universal verification is necessary, determining appropriate triggers for verification, and generating secure verification tokens with expiration times. The process should be designed to encourage users to complete verification without being overly intrusive, with options to reuse tokens for user convenience or generate new ones for enhanced security. Upon successful verification, user status should be updated on the backend to prevent race conditions and ensure a smooth user experience.