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Detecting throwaway email addresses during registration
(media.piefed.social)
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.
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.
You say it's 50/50 based on your own experience/anecdotal evidence. Admins will probably be able to make that determination with a much greater deal of accuracy based on what they see happening on their instance. So it makes sense to leave the choice to them/enable them to make that choice, right?
True, I failed to mention that I think there could be a setting to enable the feature, or dismiss the warning per-account. @rimu@piefed.social maybe consider this?
Sure
We'll see. If it turns out to be useless noise, I'll remove it from the signal.
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.