Registration, General sign up question

Hi, so I’ve been testing out the member registration component of the theme, but its a little confusing. My initial sign up test worked. I got the activation email and was able to sign up. But when I tested with a different email, the confirmation appeared in my spam or not at all.

Also. Do the users need to have a wordpress account in order to sign up? Ideally, I’d like users to just sign up directly with the site without having to additionally sign up.

Any information or help would be greatly appreciated 🙂

Tina