Confirming your email address
A confirmed address is what lets you recover the account later. The link lasts three days.
When you join, we send a message asking you to confirm your address. Opening it shows a button; pressing the button confirms.
The reason it is a button rather than something that happens the moment you open the link: corporate mail systems and link previewers fetch every URL in an incoming message before you ever see it. If simply loading the page confirmed the address, a scanner would use up your link and you would arrive to find it already spent.
The link lasts three days. If it expires, sign in and we will offer you a fresh one.
You can read and post without confirming. What an unconfirmed address costs you is the ability to get back in if you forget your password, which is a bad thing to discover at the moment you need it.
Did that answer it?
If not, tell us what is still wrong — that is how this page gets better.