Would you ever ban all free e-mail addresses?

Even well known ones like Gmail, Hotmail, AOL, Yahoo, etc?

I've seen that on quite a few sites, but I've never been a fan of the idea myself. Seems like it'd just make it difficult for legitimate members to register since not everyone gets an e-mail address from their ISP (and in the case of AOL, their ISP e-mail address is also used as a free service).

What do you think?

 

Absolutely not. :S

The vast majority of people use free email addresses, I think, and I wouldn't want to exclude a large chunk of people. I really don't think it would do much good at all.

 

Who does that? I've never used any other e-mail service that isn't free, so technically I'd have to ban myself if I did it

 

I know of sites that do this as it does keep the riff raff away. I would not personally blook all free e-mail although I do block all temporary e-mail and all e-mail from .ru and other specious providers.

 

I wouldn't, but it does keep spammers etc. away.

 

I would not because there is too many people who use them and also there is a lot of other ways to prevent spam without going this extreme.

 

I can't see any not well-established website being able to do that, and still having a member base. I know personally that I use Yahoo, simply because it's the most convenient for me. I don't know why anyone would bother banning these, since they're generally the most used. It only takes a minute to hit the "ban" button when a spammer or fake account joins, so I don't know why anyone would take such unnecessary, extreme measures to prevent spamming.

 

I would ban foreign free email addresses if they became a problem. I have banned a .ru email address on a U.S. based site already because 90% of my forum spam was coming from .ru email accounts. I'm sure the opposite applies too for websites in Russia or China.

Unless it becomes a problem however there's no need to ban everyone and if it DOES become a problem then be courteous and warn about the ban in advance so real users can be whitelisted.

 

Nope. I've been on sites where they've banned some email providers, and it's really annoying when you have to create another email to open a account, and I usually never do unless I really need a account on that site.

 

How many of your members use a .ru email Bauss, assuming you have a U.S. or Canada based forum?

I'd be willing to be it's very few and of those I doubt you'll find many great members among them.

If you get 100's of spam attempts from .ru email addresses would you consider banning it then? (example here, i'm not anti-russia by any means, the same goes both ways).

 

We got 0 users with .ru emails, but we don't get any spam accounts. All of our accounts created are done by humans, and not bots. The captcha software we use, KeyCaptcha hasn't been cracked.

 

I remember Go[****][****][****][****]Yourself.com did this for some time. I believe they changed it now as long as you get accepted by the administrator. They have 20,000,000+ posts and 1,000,000+ threads.

 

It's a bit pointless as new free email providers are popping up all the time, especially those 'temporary' email websites.

It's like trying to ban proxies, you're always going to be a step behind.

 

In my opinion, and many other's I believe, doing this would hinder everything - banning all free email accounts will probably stop at least 90% of the population of the world from registering. A very small number of people own their own domains, and those that do still like to use their free email accounts (using myself as an example - I've had my gmail email for ages, since before I had my domains and it's just so much easier to use).

As someone has said, there are much easier ways to prevent spammers from signing up - like checking registrations against a spammer database and denying them if it's there (although some legitimate emails can be added to these databases).

In conclusion, I could never see myself doing this. It would be super foolhardy - especially in a new forum

Liam

 

If I were to ban public email addresses, then I would stop a lot of people from registering. A lot of people (even me) use those addresses. Instead, I would use the stopforumspam.com API. It works better at preventing spambots than any other methods.