Banning Free or Disposable E-mail Accounts

What are your thoughts on banning free e-mail accounts thus preventing users registering with them?

What about disposable e-mail services? Do you ban them?

 

Don't like to. A few forums have pissed me off because of this. Don't want it? Then sorry, you miss out on me.

 

It's something I'm going to try and avoid but I understand why some forum do it.

 

I've tried banning them but it always locks out existing members with such email addresses even though I set it not to. (Probably some kind of plugin conflict.)

 

This is, pretty much, my exact take on this - if an administrator decides to ban a specific free e-mail address provider (or, a variety of them), they're going to be missing out... on a lot.

 

Maybe so, but if you're having a problem with trolls, sometimes it's the lesser of two weevils.

 

I hate it I tried to join an forum yesterday that had done this and I left right away. But it also depends a little if you have an community like AdminAddict then it might not matter very much since everyone here probobly have there own domain(s) but if you have an movie forum or anything then you will not have much user.

 

Well I haven't used the email addresses provided by my ISP for 5 years now. I don't even know how many email addresses that Time Warner gives me. Before that, I only used my Verizon email address because its the only one they would acknowledge as existing. I sure hate that company but I digress.

My primary email address is with MSN and has been for 7 years now. Its not a free email address. I pay $10.00 a month for 10 email addresses and 5 GB of storage space per email address. I know a lot of people that do the same thing. I learned years ago that you can't base your online identity on a commodity service like your internet provider. If a better deal comes along than you will switch providers. I would switch to any provider (except Verizon) that would offer me speeds faster than the 30 megabits/second that I am getting now in a heartbeat.

As such, I don't ban email addresses. Considering there are about 500 million people around the world using MSN/Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, Google Mail, and AOL Mail, that is a lot of people to exclude.

Disposable emails could be another story but keeping up with the list is impossible. Anyone can toss an email server on a domain name and offer free emails.

 

I banned a few services like mail.ru, but not the most popular ones like hotmail

 

Agreed - an administrator should never ban Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, etc. You'll be missing out on a lot of new member registrations when they find out they can't join with their perfectly legitimate e-mail address. Including myself.

 

i dont ban them as i use them myself-i normally use my msn one for registering on most forums, and use my gmail one when i set up my forum.

 

I have banned some of the temporary email services, like 10 minute mail.

As for yahoo and msn - I have not banned those.

 

I've used Gmail for my only email addy for 4 years after I moved house, had to change ISP and my old one closed my old addy without warning. I've come across a few forums that wouldn't let me join and felt very excluded tbh. Surely there are better ways of dealing with spam ?

 

this.

 

I have since changed my mind and banned a ton of temp/junk email accounts. I'm talking about crud like @porn.com etc. This brought my spam down to hardly nothing.

 

yeah, that sounds like a good idea, cause no serious non spam member would register with an email from @porn.com

 

Yes ma'am, I posted a large list on here or you can create one using Stopforumspam.com.