All posts in the topic Disposable Email Addresses (Short link)
Summary
- There are 7 posts — by 3 authors — in this topic.
- Latest post made by Michael JasonSmith at Apr 14 04:12 UTC
Hi all,
Just a quick note to let you know that disposable email addresses are now
blocked from OnlineGroups.Net. These temporary addresses are created and
disposed of automatically, so spammers cannot track you. Unfortunately,
disposable addresses mean that OnlineGroups.Net cannot track the user to
provide help, and ensure that the terms and conditions are not broken. Recently
disposable email addresses were used to send some spam, which is what prompted
the ban!
As there is no legitimate use for disposable email addresses, I doubt that the
ban will cause a problem.
Kind regards,
Michael
Could you give some examples of what a 'disposable email address is' or how
onlinegroups will be blocking them ?
Thanks
DorjeM - Kiwi Intranets
On Mon, 2008-04-14 at 15:12 +1200, <email obscured> wrote:
> Could you give some examples of what a 'disposable email address is' or
> how onlinegroups will be blocking them ?
Hi Dorje:
A disposable address is a temporary email address, typically used to
signup for services that don't really need your email address other than
to spam you (for example, buying something from a company over the
Internet).
One example is www.spamgourmet.com.
Now, this is very useful, but it's also very useful for spammers to sign
up to onlinegroups.net, verify their account, and have no further
accountability. Out of 20,000 odd users we have seen through the
software, only the spammers appear to have used these accounts.
Often they are also time limited (say, to 7 days), which means that
eventually they will bounce requiring us to do bounce-management work
(and eventually we will have an interface for the admin's to see this,
which means extra work for them as well!)
The tweak that Mike has made is to prevent users from signing up or
adding a disposable address to their account.
Best regards,
Richard Waid
Technical Director
onlinegroups.net
> Could you give some examples of what a 'disposable email address is' > or how onlinegroups will be blocking them ? Sure! The Open Directory lists many providers of temporary email addresses: http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/E-mail/Spam/Preventing/Temporary_Addresses/ If you try and use a disposable email address, OnlineGroups.Net replies with the message similar to the following The email address "<email obscured>" is from a disposable email-address provider; disposable email-addresses cannot be used with this site. The likes of Yahoo! Mail, Microsoft Live Mail (nee Microsoft Hotmail) and Google Mail (also known as GMail) are not effected by this change.
Thanks Richard,
I guess what I was really trying to ask is - How are Online groups sure that
the fix just put in place hasn't cut out the target users for X online group ?
I assume you've got a list - hopefully dynamic, which lists all the domains
which are used by spammers for this sort of thing and that hopefully no real
users have email accounts on these domains.
The reason I raise this is that many years ago in the dark ages of the internet
a national ISP domain was breached by spammers and the legitimate email holders
for that domain were barred from certain services because the isp had been
breached and blacklisted.
If onlinegroups.net makes the list available to admins e.g. a php page listing
the domains that are blocked then the admin could quickly identify why a user
was having a problem. Better yet if the admin listing of users for a group
showed an icon next to users who had email addresses that matched the list then
the admins could resolve access problems even quicker.
Not wanting to be down on you guys because you do an awesome job and provide a
great product - just trying to think ahead of the curve to potential problems.
On Mon, 2008-04-14 at 15:48 +1200, <email obscured> wrote:
> I assume you've got a list - hopefully dynamic, which lists all the
> domains which are used by spammers for this sort of thing and that
> hopefully no real users have email accounts on these domains. The
> reason I raise this is that many years ago in the dark ages of the
> internet a national ISP domain was breached by spammers and the
> legitimate email holders for that domain were barred from certain
> services because the isp had been breached and blacklisted.
It's actually a pretty small list, and the only addresses you can
generally get at these providers are disposable.
I agree that it would be worth publicising the list, we're not trying to
limit the users, just remove potential problems. (it's not useful for a
user to have an account from spam gourmet that can only receive 5 emails
for example!)
> Not wanting to be down on you guys because you do an awesome job and
> provide a great product - just trying to think ahead of the curve to
> potential problems.
Thanks for that Dorje, we do try :)
Publicising the list is easy: * dodgit.com * enterto.com * myspamless.com * e4ward.com * guerrillamail.biz * jetable.net * mailinator.com * mintemail.com * vansoftcorp.com * plasticinbox.com * pookmail.com * shieldedmail.net * sneakemail.com * spamgourmet.com * spambox.us * spaml.com * temporaryinbox.com * mx0.wwwnew.eu * bodhi.lawlita.com * mail.htl22.at * zoemail.net * despam.it I do not claim that the list is exhaustive :) I compiled it by working through the list at The Open Directory http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/E-mail/Spam/Preventing/Temporary_Addresses/ and noting the right-hand-side of all the addresses I could find. I looked at using UnDisposable.Net http://undisposable.net/ However, it did not mark all the sites I found as disposable email addresses. Hopefully the error message will allow the user to determine why the address is problematic. The current implementation blocks the email addresses at the “entry points” to the system: the registration and email settings pages. Because of this, it *should* be impossible for a member to have a disposable email address associated with his or her profile.
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