Ah, I can finally log in! The green OK button was just spinning before when clicked, instead of actually doing anything, on both the account creation screen and the login screen, and even the "forgot password" button did nothing when I clicked on it. But now I can just log in with the account I tried to make yesterday, even though the OK button never went through.

Definitely a wise move. In the context of everything, new users presented with too high a barrier for entry will likely turn around and go back to reddit. I tried signing up over 24 hours ago, and never received the email, I've only just been able to log in for the first time now.

I highly recommend adding a question and the captcha though.
There is a big problem with bots accounts the last few days.

While I appreciate the change as it allows me to actually login, there's been a lot of issues with spam accounts reported at a lot of Lemmy and kbin instances. For example: https://mstdn.social/@stux/110582137637837383

Huh. In the list with "fastest growing #Lemmy instances" are only spam instances now

I'm currently creating an instance ban list for Geddit to block those instances if they don't take action.. This is a disaster waiting to happen

...

Lemmy ‘total users’ has now reached the million..

That’s ~200K new spam accounts in the past hours or so 🙀

All to say, anything you can do to fix the email issue and get email verification back on would be appreciated 🙏