Symptom · sign-up
The confirmation email never arrived, or the link will not work
An account that reaches “check your email” and stops there is a mail delivery problem, not a game problem. The causes are few, well understood, and almost all of them are fixable from your side within a quarter of an hour.
Wait fifteen minutes, then search every folder of your mailbox for the vendor’s name rather than scrolling the inbox. If nothing appears, request a resend and read the address shown on the resend screen character by character. If a resend also fails to arrive, the address is either wrong or your mail provider is blocking the message, and a different provider’s address is the fastest test of which.
First, how long is too long
Confirmation mail is usually delivered within a minute or two, but a delay of several minutes is normal and not a sign of failure. The ordinary cause is greylisting: a receiving mail server temporarily refuses an unfamiliar sender’s first delivery attempt and accepts the retry a few minutes later. It is a legitimate anti-spam measure working exactly as intended, and there is nothing to fix.
Use fifteen minutes as the point at which to start looking, and an hour as the point at which to stop waiting. Requesting three resends in the first five minutes makes things worse rather than better: some systems invalidate earlier links each time a new one is issued, so the message that does eventually arrive may be one you have already superseded.
Nothing at all has arrived after fifteen minutes
- Likely causes
- Filtering into spam or a tabbed category, a mistyped address, an address at a domain that rejects unfamiliar senders, or a full mailbox.
- What to do
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- Search, do not browse. Use your mail client’s search across all folders for the vendor’s name and for the word “confirm”. Spam folders sort by their own rules and a message can be several screens down.
- Check tabbed categories. Providers that sort mail into Primary, Promotions, Social and Updates routinely put transactional mail in Updates or Promotions.
- Look at the address you actually entered. The resend screen normally shows it. Read it aloud. Transposed characters and a missing letter in a domain are the two usual culprits, and both produce silence rather than a bounce.
- Check that the mailbox is not full. A mailbox at its storage limit rejects incoming mail, and free accounts left unattended for years reach that limit quietly.
- Test with a different provider. If you can create the account with an address at a different provider and the mail arrives instantly, the original provider was the problem. That single test saves an hour of guessing.
It arrived, but in spam, and clicking the link does nothing
- Likely causes
- Spam folders often disable links in message bodies, strip the HTML, or rewrite links to a warning page.
- What to do
- Move the message to your inbox first, then open it and click the link. If the link is still inert, use the client’s option to show the original or plain-text version, copy the full address of the link and paste it into the browser yourself. Make sure you copy the whole thing — confirmation links are long, and mail clients wrap them across lines, so a copy that stops at the line break produces an “invalid link” page.
The link says it has expired or is invalid
- Likely causes
- Confirmation links have a deliberate lifetime, commonly measured in hours or a day or two. They are also frequently single-use, and superseded whenever a new one is issued.
- What to do
- Request a fresh confirmation email and use the newest message in the mailbox, not the first one you received. If you asked for several resends, delete the older messages so you cannot click the wrong one. If the newest link is also rejected immediately, the likeliest explanation is that the address is already confirmed — try signing in before requesting anything further.
The address was typed incorrectly
- Likely causes
- A single wrong character, usually in the domain rather than the local part.
- What to do
- Most sign-up flows let an unconfirmed account correct its address from the resend screen or from account settings. If the account cannot be edited because it is unconfirmed, and the vendor has no self-service route, the practical answer is to register again with the correct address and ask support to remove the stranded one. Do not leave a half-created account on an address you do not own.
You used an alias, a plus-address, or a forwarding address
- Likely causes
- Plus-addressing, custom-domain forwarders and relay services are valid but not universally handled. Some sign-up forms reject the address, some accept it and then fail to deliver, and some deliver to a forwarder that strips the HTML.
- What to do
- If confirmation stalls on an aliased address, register with a plain address at a mainstream provider instead. A privacy-preserving alias is a reasonable thing to want, but it is worth establishing that the account works before adding complexity to it.
It is a work, school or university address
- Likely causes
- Organisational mail filtering. Messages may be quarantined at the gateway and never reach your mailbox, and the quarantine is usually invisible to you.
- What to do
- Use a personal address. Asking an IT department to release a game registration message from quarantine is slow, sometimes refused, and puts a personal account on an address you may lose when you leave. This is the single most common cause in this whole list that cannot be fixed from your own machine.
You confirmed it, and it still asks you to confirm
- Likely causes
- A cached sign-in state, two accounts on similar addresses, or a confirmation that registered on the website but not yet in the launcher.
- What to do
- Sign out of the launcher completely and sign in again, rather than restarting it. If the website shows the account as confirmed and the launcher does not, that gap is what a full sign-out clears. If both still ask, check whether you created two accounts on similar addresses and confirmed the other one.
Telling a real confirmation from a fake one
Registration is a moment when you are expecting an email, which is exactly when a fraudulent one is most likely to be believed. Three characteristics separate a genuine confirmation message from a fake.
- It asks for a click, not for data. A real confirmation link proves you can read mail at that address. It does not need your password, your card number or a photograph of your identity documents.
- It arrives because you did something. A confirmation email for an account you did not create is either someone typing your address by mistake, or a prompt designed to make you click. Ignoring it is safe; the unconfirmed account expires.
- The link goes where it claims. Hover over it and read the destination in the status bar before clicking. A mismatch between the visible text and the actual domain is the clearest single indicator of a fraudulent message.
Scamwatch, run by the National Anti-Scam Centre, publishes information about current scams and accepts reports at scamwatch.gov.au. The Australian Cyber Security Centre publishes the Australian Government’s cyber security guidance for individuals at cyber.gov.au. If you clicked a link and entered a password, change that password everywhere it was used and read the account security page for the order to do things in.
What to watch out for
Search results for phrases like “confirmation email not working” sometimes return pages offering to “verify” or “activate” an account on the vendor’s behalf, or a downloadable tool that claims to fix it. No such tool exists for anyone else’s account system. Confirmation is handled by the vendor and by your mail provider, and nothing installed on your computer can complete it.
Where this fits in the sign-up
Confirmation is the second of three stages, and the one with the fewest moving parts on your machine. If you have not reached it yet, the full walkthrough covers the account form. If confirmation succeeded and the trouble started when the game tried to run, the problem has moved to your computer and the install and launch page takes over.
The product covered on this site, Enlisted, uses this sequence: register, confirm the email address, then sign in and launch the game on a desktop computer running Windows, macOS or Linux.
A paid link: registering through it earns Vanguard Hub a commission from the advertising network, at no cost to you and with no effect on what this page says.
Questions people ask at this stage
Can I ask the vendor to confirm the address for me?
Generally no. The point of the confirmation step is to prove that the person holding the account can read mail at that address, so a support team confirming it manually would defeat it. Support can usually help with a stranded account on a mistyped address, which is a different request.
Does marking the message as “not spam” help future emails arrive?
Yes, for your own mailbox. It teaches your provider’s filter that mail from that sender is wanted, which affects later messages such as password resets and security notices. Adding the sender to your contacts has a similar effect with most providers.
Why did it work instantly for someone else on the same connection?
Because delivery depends on the receiving mail provider, not on the connection. Two people in the same house using different mail providers can have entirely different experiences with the same sender, and that is the normal state of affairs rather than a fault.
Is it safe to use a temporary or disposable address?
It is common, but it has a practical cost: account recovery, security alerts and any support correspondence all go to an address you no longer read. Many services also refuse known disposable domains outright at sign-up. A dedicated personal address used only for games is a better compromise.