---
title: "Cleaning Up Ghost Users After OTP Registration in .NET"
url: https://daily.dev/posts/cleaning-up-ghost-users-after-otp-registration-in-net-aukradz4n
source_url: https://mwaseemzakir.substack.com/p/cleaning-up-ghost-users-in-dotnet
type: article
source: "Waseem .NET Newsletter"
published: 2026-07-25T04:09:30.276Z
updated: 2026-07-25T04:37:11.596Z
tags: [".net"]
reading_time: 10
upvotes: 4
comments: 1
language: en
---

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# Cleaning Up Ghost Users After OTP Registration in .NET

**[Waseem .NET Newsletter](https://daily.dev/sources/mwaseemzakir)** · 10 min read · 4 upvotes · 1 comments

## Summary

When users start registration but never verify their OTP, their rows linger as 'ghost users' — polluting metrics and blocking email reuse. The solution is to model unverified signups explicitly with a Pending status, flip to Active only on OTP verification, add a partial index on pending rows for cheap scans, and run a Quartz.NET background job every 15 minutes to hard-delete anyone who never verified within a configurable window. Two-table separation (pending_users vs users) is also discussed as an alternative for high-query-load scenarios. Bonus considerations include decoupling OTP sending via domain events, the outbox pattern for delivery guarantees, rate limiting on registration endpoints, and making the cleanup job safe for multi-instance deployments.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://mwaseemzakir.substack.com/p/cleaning-up-ghost-users-in-dotnet>

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---

Tags: [#.net](https://daily.dev/tags/.net)

[View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/cleaning-up-ghost-users-after-otp-registration-in-net-aukradz4n)