Earlier this year, I came across an article entitled Sniper Links: How To Increase Your Email Confirmation Rates from the folks over at growth.design. It sounds a little clickbait-y, but it's both benign and brilliant: when asking folks to confirm their email, try and figure out what email provider they're using (gmail, outlook, and so on) and give them a deep link that opens up the search functionality in those apps.

A few months ago, we shipped this functionality as a little test to see if it was in fact useful.

It was! We saw statistically significant uplift — around 6% — in double opt-in for folks shown the sniper link.

We were so happy with this that we decided to release it as a free tool: sniperl.ink (I was a sucker for the clever domain name). It's totally free.

You can use it either as an API call to get a magic URL:

fetch(`https://sniperl.ink/v1/render?recipient=${
    recipient
  }&sender=justin@buttondown.email`)

Or as a web component:

<sniper-link
  recipient="you@example.com"
  from="justin@buttondown.email"
/>
<script src="https://sniperl.ink/v1/sniper-link.js" defer></script>

We support Gmail, Yahoo, Proton, iCloud, Outlook, HEY, AOL, and Mail.ru, which counts for over 85% of the traffic we've seen thus far.

That's it! I hope you like it, and shoot us an email if you have any questions or feature requests.