

Block disposable emails - tomazstolfa
http://www.block-disposable-email.com/

======
KevinMS
What about disposable email address services who offer exclusive domains for
paying customers? Are you going to characterize those addresses as "fake"? I
see you are actually doing that now!

I know these evil disposable email address users and they are not the abusers
you think they are. In fact a lot of them have been more abused by the sites
you are providing a service to than vice versa.

There are better ways of combating abusers then just banning a domain, and
would cause a lot less grief. A central repository of "fake" domains
inevitably will cause false positives on a large scale and will cause a whole
lot of grief to everybody.

Full disclosure: I came out with the first disposable email address service,
as far as I know, and I'm quite certain I even coined the term "disposable
email address", as obvious as it may seem, it wasn't at the time, and I can't
imagine what you think of me!

------
jrmg
I use sneakemail.com as a way of filtering mail and tracking email addresses I
give out to web sites and mailing lists (/not/ as 'disposable' addresses), and
both their domains (sneakemail.com and the newer snkmail.com) are blocked by
this service.

Blocking these email addresses is counterproductive. The only site I've
encountered in the past that blocked Sneakemail was Digg, and I didn't sign up
as a result. They /may/ have blocked a few 'disposable' accounts with this
strategy, but they /definitely/ lost at least one 'real' user because of it.
In addition to this, I have no doubt that there were orders of magnitude more
'disposable' Hotmail and GMail addresses signed up for Digg that there would
have been Sneakemail addresses, so they need to deal with the 'problem' of
undetectable disposable accounts anyway.

Sneakemail is a great service, BTW. I hope stuff like this doesn't render it
useless.

~~~
retube
Yes, quite. Hotmail and gmail etc offer what are essentially disposable
addresses (free to sign up). The _only_ issue with these is that there is
_some_ overhead with signing up - a fair amount of personal data required,
which whilst can be faked they (well hotmail anyway) does annoying things like
confirm validity of zipcode.

------
domas
The goal should be attracting customers that want to read your emails. If they
are using disposable emails, that means you do something wrong. Maybe you
should skip email requirement?

~~~
SimonPStevens
I can't agree more. Regardless of whether you force your customers to use a
real email address or not isn't going to change the fact that if they don't
want your emails they aren't going to read them.

If you force the emails on them they are only likely to become annoyed at your
company and reduce their interactions with you.

Do two things. Make the email address optional. Make the email content so
desirable that the customers provide their real email address at their own
free will. It's the best of both worlds, now you only have email addresses in
your list of people who are genuinely interested in seeing your content.

------
jrockway
Next week on HN, I'll unveil my new browser extension: block-sites-that-block-
disposable-emails.com.

Why should I trust someone I've never heard of with my real email address?
Trust is earned, and I am not going to use a service that requires a "real"
email address.

Besides; I run my own email server... how do you even know I'm delivering your
email to a file and not to /dev/null? You don't. This service is bullshit.

------
copypasteweb
Any free email provider can be used for fake, one-time, temporary email
addresses - it just takes a bit more time to register another one. It's just
annoying when email is needed to create an account, and way more annoying when
it filters email addresses for no reason.

~~~
wyclif
Yes, and this is a war that cannot be won. Measures like this will simply
escalate it to the next level. The reason people use throwaway accounts is
because they don't want to receive email as a consequence of signing up. The
solution seems simple: don't require email to create an account.

------
muppetman
And if a website enforces this, well, I didn't want to sign up anyway.

------
tomjen3
I can imagine several different PHB deciding to require that the developers
use this.

The problem is that if the user doesn't want to read you email, they won't.

This service is like selling megaphones to advertisers - it doesn't make
people buy your service/read your email but it does increase the profit for
the megaphone suppliers.

------
yannickmahe
This is starting to feel like an arms race. Next, there will be undetectable
disposable emails, and then automatic detection of undetectable disposable
emails.

------
mcritz
I have a catch-all account for my domain. If I sign up for a service I use
their domain as the user on the address I give out. E.g.
facebook@mydomain.com.

The result is that all email that isn't personal nor directly related to my
business gets sent to an account that I check once a day.

If an address gets spammy or, like the Epsilon situation, a service provider
gets hacked I can block my account without consequence.

------
rvkennedy
Here's a thought: instead of dealing with crap like this, what about a service
for mailing lists that collects email addresses, and stores them internally.
Companies wanting to reach customers can put the signup form as js on their
websites, but never get the actual email addresses. The mailing list service
passes the newsletters on to subscribers, who are free to click links and form
a more direct relationship with the client company, but guarantees to users
that:

1\. It will never directly pass email addresses to the client company or any
third party.

2\. All unsubscribes will be respected immediately.

So you can sign up with confidence. The downside for the client company is it
doesn't get those sweet, juicy email addresses. The upside - lots more
signups, and no fake addresses.

~~~
bajsejohannes
Feeds (atom, rss) solves this quite well already.

~~~
retube
really? can you expand on this?

~~~
bajsejohannes
Instead of sending out a newsletter, the company just adds an item to its
feed.

Interested users can add the feed to their feed-reader, and can unsubscribe at
any point by removing it again.

It has all the benefits of the OP's suggestion, but it is already available. I
guess it is debatable whether having it in your feed reader or inbox is a pro
or a con (I personally don't want mass email in my inbox).

------
rtp
One problem with a service like this is: how do I know if I can trust it with
people's email addresses? How do I know that this site doesn't store the
emails tested and sell them to spammers?

~~~
jrockway
_How do I know that this site doesn't store the emails tested and sell them to
spammers?_

Why wouldn't it?

------
itzekocke
Hi

Kevin is right, also jrmg and most others from my point of view. I am the one
who started the service discussed.

As in every topic there are at least two positions. I think in normal cases
the service will help service providers to keep the userdatabase clean of
temporary mail addresses. From the point of a user (and I am often only a user
looking for services) it should also not be a problem to give a email address
away if you trust the provider.

But I agree: In special cases acting as a user it is useful not to give
someone the email address. Like a creditcard number.

From providers angle I would decline such email addresses in every case. Most
of the services are free today - so the only return service is to have a
communication channel to the user. It's clear for me not to spam my users as I
treat them as customers.

It's up to you if and how you use the service. And hopefully most of you would
like them.

But I know that not everyone is happy with that kind of abuse killing abuse
killing systems ... (see jrockways new idea of block-sites-that-block-
disposable-emails.com).

Best regards,

Gerold <http://www.block-disposable-email.com>

~~~
HerraBRE
Why is this not done as an RBL-style DNS-based blacklist? The queries are
cheaper, mirroring and distributed caching are already built-in...

Of course, charging for access would be harder, but you can still offer to
sell people lists who don't want to rely on external infrastructure.

~~~
itzekocke
I had DNS RBL in mind because of your mentioned advantages. But the service
needs the new domain-feed done by users requesting the service. As far as I
know this is not possible by DNS RBL.

And: for me it was easier to develop a web based service than doing new things
with bind.

Gerold

~~~
HerraBRE
Fair 'nuff. :-)

In case you want to revisit, dynamic DNS is really easy to do with PowerDNS
(an alternative to bind).

I've combined PowerDNS and Redis with a relatively thin Python glue layer, and
then done some funky things with subclassing that to create programmatic
answers to certain queries instead of just looking things up. PowerDNS also
has native backends for MySQL and some others.

If you're interested in my Python/Redis stuff, the code is here:
<https://github.com/pagekite/PyPdnsRedis/>

------
kree10
<http://www.block-disposable-email.com/response_codes.php> says:

 _"MX does not exist": The corresponding domain does not have a mailexchanger
(MX-DNS RR). Domains without a MX are not able to receive emails._

No! Lack of an MX does NOT mean non-deliverable!

------
dclaysmith
Or you can use the old username+SOMETERMYOUFILTEROUT@gmail.com.

~~~
joshfinnie
Don't you know that having a plus sign in your email breaks half of the
websites' regex.

    
    
        "There is an invalid character in your email address,
        please try again."

~~~
user24
then it's worth letting them know their site is broken.

------
the-kenny
In Gmail, you can add arbitrary dots (.) to your email address and add filters
based on it: f.o.o@gmail.com You can also append a plus-sign with arbitrary
text on it: foo+asdfsdfaiugo@gmail.com Both will route mails to foo@gmail.com.

As said, you can add a filter to add a label to all mails to this address and
skip inbox for them. That's what I do.

