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Detect up to 1327 disposable email providers with MailChecker

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Re: Detect up to 1327 disposable email providers with MailChecker

#31
post #17

If your site will be sending something of value over email, then people will want to use a real address, and you don't need this. On the other hand, if you just want a user ID, then it doesn't matter what they use, and you don't need this, either. So, if you use this, you're a site who wants a real deliverable address for some reason, but which doesn't offer enough benefit to the user to naturally compel them to shar…

I built this kind of check into my ecommerce sites for high-value items. They're disproportionally susceptible to fraud and carding for some reason, and implementing a "no free email provider" check has cut fraud on those items to zero.

I expect blocking GMail, Hotmail, & Yahoo Mail also cut your conversion rate close to a factor of zero of what it would otherwise be.

Re: Detect up to 1327 disposable email providers with MailChecker

#32
post #3

> This will be very helpful when you have to contact your users Someone using a disposable address probably does not even care about your "need". Why block them?

Why allow them if you think they probably are more trouble than they are worth? (no way to contact them if there are payment issues, easier to take-over accounts, ...)

IMHO it really depends on the kind of service if this makes sense or not.

Re: Detect up to 1327 disposable email providers with MailChecker

#33
post #32
post #3

> This will be very helpful when you have to contact your users Someone using a disposable address probably does not even care about your "need". Why block them?

Why allow them if you think they probably are more trouble than they are worth? (no way to contact them if there are payment issues, easier to take-over accounts, ...) IMHO it really depends on the kind of service if this makes sense or not.

Totally depends but in the majority of cases I see no issues. Why do you assume they are up to cause trouble? I used throw-away mails hundreds of times and the only thing I usually did was inflate their user table with another single time visitor.

Re: Detect up to 1327 disposable email providers with MailChecker

#34
post #31
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I built this kind of check into my ecommerce sites for high-value items. They're disproportionally susceptible to fraud and carding for some reason, and implementing a "no free email provider" check has cut fraud on those items to zero.

I expect blocking GMail, Hotmail, & Yahoo Mail also cut your conversion rate close to a factor of zero of what it would otherwise be.

Here's how that might happen: http://mailinator.blogspot.com/2011/05/how-to-get-gmailcom-b...

Re: Detect up to 1327 disposable email providers with MailChecker

#35
I think this would be more usable if the lists weren't hard-coded into the functions. Passing JSON as a parameter would be possible for any language worth using, no "templates" necessary. Requiring Node.js to rebuild an array inside a PHP function seems kind of weird.

Also, list.json doesn't appear to be a valid json file since it uses comments.

I'm not going to comment on whether or not I think it's useful.

Re: Detect up to 1327 disposable email providers with MailChecker

#36
post #30

An argument that I haven't seen yet is that some of these providers allow to choose the mail address used, allowing anybody who knows or can guess the address used to take over the account.

I signup with bugmenot:bugmenot whenever I can to explicitly allow that.

Re: Detect up to 1327 disposable email providers with MailChecker

#37
So much vitriol in here for something I immediately thought: "damn, that'd be handy." So often we have a potential student email us, and our reply disappears into a spam folder because it came from Zendesk or Postmark, or because their own words (echoed back) trigger it. And when we finally reach those people, people who actually and legitimately want to talk to us, they're thankful that we tried to find them, and asked us to change their email entry in our database to a more reliable one. Then there are those who get angrier and angrier at our failure to respond, while our responses are piling up in a spam folder somewhere. Well THAT's a great start to what is typically a years-long relationship. Or those who just take their business elsewhere.

Incidentally, ours is a B2B market, remember that when judging how we - and others - roll. Also: we check RBLs and test deliverability frequently, use SPF/DKIM allowing the providers we use to deliver mail on behalf of our domain, and we have DMARC configured so we can better monitor deliverability issues.

I'd use this to show a brief warning on our "contact us" form: "we've found that using an email provider such as example.com may result in our reply getting filed away as spam, and we recommend using your real work address to be sure you see our reply without having to dig through all the spam on your personal email account. You don't have to change it, but we wanted to warn you in advance."

Re: Detect up to 1327 disposable email providers with MailChecker

#38
post #31
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I built this kind of check into my ecommerce sites for high-value items. They're disproportionally susceptible to fraud and carding for some reason, and implementing a "no free email provider" check has cut fraud on those items to zero.

I expect blocking GMail, Hotmail, & Yahoo Mail also cut your conversion rate close to a factor of zero of what it would otherwise be.

Nope. The blocking is only active on certain products over $500 that don't make sense for non-companies to buy.

Re: Detect up to 1327 disposable email providers with MailChecker

#39
post #8

I've encountered sites that do this kind of check before, and I usually just don't bother signing up. It's usually the case that I didn't /really/ want to sign up anyway, but I needed something (that with a little effort I could find elsewhere)

Seriously, if any site owner has even a half of a brain, he should stay away from this shit. Disposable email exists for a reason.

That is not true at all.

If your site is just a chat forum and you don't mind spammers, sure let people use disposable emails.

If your site involves money or auctions or credit cards.. letting disposable emails in can be very costly.

Re: Detect up to 1327 disposable email providers with MailChecker

#40

hushmail.com is on that list, this is an increased privacy email with built-in PGP and encryption support, and it's a paid service this is hardly a throwaway email, funny enough their alias domains (e.g. nym.hush.com) aren't on that list, if any one will use it as a throwaway email (i do) they'll use the alias function and delete or suspended the alias after the signup (that's what i do, if i need to reset a password…

China's largest freemail provider (which requires a chinese national identity number to register for) is also on that list.

Lol.

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