This help page is ahow-to guide. It explains concepts or processes used by the Wikipedia community. It is not one ofWikipedia's policies or guidelines, and may reflect varying levels ofconsensus.

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Wikipedia requires that users confirm their email addresses before they can use email features such asemailing users, receivingemail notifications, and the ability toreset your password. This helps to prevent problems with bad addresses or spam. You only need to confirm email addresses to use the email system; you can log in and edit pages without confirming your address. You are not even required to enter an email address to register; it is optional. (However,administrators are expected to have a confirmed email address.)

You can check your address confirmation status inyour preferences. If your account was registered prior to March 2, 2006 (when confirmation was enforced), your existing address (if any) hasnot been automatically confirmed. If you change your email address, you will automatically be sent a new confirmation email.

1. Fromyour preferences, go to the section entitledUser profile, and scroll down toEmail options, if desired check the box next toEnable email from other users.
2. Click the button in that section; an email will be sent to your email address with a confirmation link. If you see no link, go toSpecial:ConfirmEmail. If that page starts with "Your email address was confirmed on <date>", then you're already confirmed.
3. When you receive the email, click the link it contains to confirm that you own the email address.

• MediaWiki does not verify that email addresses areproperly formatted when they are stored in the database (seephab:T24449). Users should verify that their email address is functional before entering it.
• Some email programs may divide the confirmation link into two lines. If that happens, please copy all parts of the link together into the browser address bar.
• If you do not receive the confirmation email, check with your mail provider and mail software to see if the message was blocked as "spam". If you cannot receive the mail with your normal mail service then you can try another, for example one of the freewebmails incomparison of webmail providers.
• If you do not receive the confirmation email, but your email seems to work otherwise, check with your mail provider to see whether they have used an IP address in their domainMX record, instead of a domain name, as required byrfc 1035, section 3.3.9. On the web, you can usemxtoolbox.com. On Linux, you can check usingdig, and ensuring that the rightmost column in theANSWER SECTION is a domain name and not an IP address. For example, gmail.com is OK here:

$ dig gmail.com mx; <<>> DiG 9.6.2-P1-RedHat-9.6.2-2.P1.fc11 <<>> gmail.com mx;; global options: +cmd;; Got answer:;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 51836;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 5, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0;; QUESTION SECTION:;gmail.com.            IN    MX;; ANSWER SECTION:gmail.com.        1912    IN    MX    40 alt4.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.gmail.com.        1912    IN    MX    5 gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.gmail.com.        1912    IN    MX    10 alt1.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.gmail.com.        1912    IN    MX    20 alt2.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.gmail.com.        1912    IN    MX    30 alt3.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.;; Query time: 15 msec;; SERVER: 24.29.103.15#53(24.29.103.15);; WHEN: Fri Apr 23 02:24:50 2010;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 150

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