Hi Katie,
It sounds like your ISP is rejecting the emails we send. They are either delivering the message to your junk email folder, or blocking it altogether. In the former case, you can simply check your junk folder to find our email. In the latter, you could try contacting your ISP to see if anything can be done, but in most cases it's more trouble than it's worth.
The easiest workaround is to use a different email address. If you don't have one, there are many options for free email services such as Gmail. It will take you much less time and effort to open a new Gmail account than to wait around on the phone for tech support from your ISP. You can even have Gmail forward the mail to your main email address, which is far less likely to be rejected when it comes from a monster like Google than when it comes from a puny mom & pop operation like ours.
I wish I could do more, but we do go to great lengths to make sure our email lists stay clean and are accepted by as many ISP's as possible. Unfortunately, as they say, you can't win 'em all. We do our best to thwart the daily onslaught of hackers, whose existence both necessitates this double opt-in process, and increases our chance of winding up on some random ISP's blacklist. It's all part of the business of running a website.
The bottom line is, we need a valid, current email address in order to create a user account for you, because we need to be able to contact you. We're not spammers; We just need the ability to contact our users regarding the status of their accounts upon occasion, such as renewal time, when we make changes, etc. And the double opt-in process is the best (and industry standard) way of confirming your email address. And although you may have a valid email address, if we can't get an email into your inbox, then it's as good as invalid from our perspective.
I hope I've written this all in a way that makes sense to you. Please keep us informed of your progress, and let us know if you have any additional questions.
Regards,
Jonathan Atkinson
www.ballroomdancers.com