Your customers
Customer accounts
Anyone can read your portal. To vote, post a request or comment, a customer has an account on it: their email address and a one-time link, with no password and no form to fill in. You integrate nothing.
Signing in
- The customer clicks Sign in in the portal header, or votes, posts or comments while signed out.
- They enter their email, and CatchLoop sends a one-time link.
- Following it shows who it signs in and what it will do (count a vote, post a request). One press opens a session, does that, and returns them to the request they were on, not a generic landing page. The link carries that place, so it works from a phone as well as from the computer they started on.
The session lasts 180 days. A customer can add a display name, shown on their comments; their email is never shown on the portal.
One account, one vote per request. An account belongs to your team's portal only: the same address on another team's portal is a separate account, and nothing links the two.
What the link guarantees
| Property | Value | Why | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lifetime | 1 hour | Long enough to survive a slow inbox or a meeting, short enough that a forwarded mail is rarely still usable. | |
| Uses | 1 | The token is marked used on first redemption. A replayed link does nothing. | |
| Mail scanners | safe | Opening the link spends nothing; only the press does. Security gateways that open every link before the reader (Outlook Safe Links, Mimecast, Proofpoint) leave it working and cast no vote. | |
| Storage | hash only | Only the hash of the token is stored, so a database read never yields a working link. | |
| Send rate | 5 / hour | Per address on your portal, so an address cannot be used to send mail at someone. |
My requests
A signed-in customer has a My requests page on your portal. It lists every request they posted, voted on or commented on, which are the requests they follow.
- Mute one request, and they are not emailed when it ships.
- Stop all emails from your portal in one click, and turn them back on later.
- Sign out of the session.
Every announcement email links to My requests, and carries an unsubscribe link that works in one click. What gets sent, and when, is on the announcements page.