Handling Supabase SignUp Edge Cases: Verified vs Unverified vs New Email Logic

[MUHAMMAD-ALI-BILAL]

Body

Hi Supabase team 👋,

I'm working on a React + Supabase Auth setup for user registration and I've run into a challenge regarding how to handle different account states on sign-up.

1-Sign up users and send a confirmation email (✅).
2- Prevent duplicate sign-ups if the email is already verified (✅).
3- Prevent sign-ups if the email is already registered but not verified (❌).
4- Only insert data into my auth.users table when the email is newly registered (and allow Supabase to handle the verification email automatically).

💡 My Problem
Supabase creates a new user object even if the email is already registered but not verified. I want to avoid this behavior and show a message like:
“Email already registered but not verified. Please check your inbox.”
But there's no clear way to distinguish this cleanly at the signUp call level.

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[hasnaintypes]

Yeah I ran into this exact issue. Supabase doesn’t throw a specific error if the email is unverified it just creates another user entry. What worked for me was doing a pre-check using rpc or RLS to check if the email already exists in auth.users before calling signUp(). If found and unverified, I redirect with a message like "Email already registered but not verified. Please check your inbox."

It’s a bit of a manual workaround, but it avoids duplicate signups for unverified users.