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rimu@piefed.social

Detecting throwaway email addresses during registration (infosec.pub)

submitted 7 months ago by rimu@piefed.social to c/piefed_meta@piefed.social

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Spammers, trolls, and ban evaders often use temporary email addresses. PieFed now checks a list of known temporary email providers and displays a warning icon next to registrations that use such services.

If registration mode is set to "Open" (no approval needed) then the site admin(s) receive a notification instead.

A throwaway email address isn't always a bad thing but it's one factor that admins might want to take into account.

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[–] oranki@piefed.social 35 points 7 months ago (6 children)

I have to chime in and say this feels a bit underthought feature. I use a throwaway email for everything possible, and I would imagine a large portion of Fediverse users do that too.

I also get the motivation behind the feature. I didn't feel like throwaway addresses are worth it before I started using them. They may seem like an obvious spammer flag. But I'd say it's 50/50, just like with any free email provider like gmail or Proton mail.

[–] rimu@piefed.social 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

We'll see. If it turns out to be useless noise, I'll remove it from the signal.

[–] Undearius@lemmy.ca 2 points 7 months ago

I think it's good that it's a simple flag and not an outright block.

It's just a way for admins to see "maybe take a closer look at this registration."

I'm sure there are a lot of legitimate users that use these types of emails, though.

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