Email verification
AnkiWeb was previously lax about verifying your email address, sending a message out when you sign up for an account but not requiring that it be responded to. The problem with this is that email hosts don't like it when email is sent to invalid addresses, and we risk the messages we send about the service landing in the spam folder or being dropped completely if the email providers decide the valid/invalid ratio is not good enough.
So to address this, we've had to start verifying your email address is valid once a year. Once you click the link in the verify email message, it tells us your address is current and we are known to you, so we can send you service-related mails in the future (like when you reset your password) with a reasonable degree of certainty that the mails will not bounce back.
Please note our privacy policy has not changed - we will only use your email address for messages related to Anki.