Show HN: List of disposable email domains to prevent fake registrations | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: List of disposable email domains to prevent fake registrations

disposable-emails.github.io

28 pointszenull30 comments

Sorry, but if an unknown and untrusted site demands my "real" e-mail address, I just won't register. If they don't accept a disposable e-mail address, what that says to me is that they want to make it harder for me to unsubscribe from any spam they might send me. Or maybe they want to track me across multiple sites, which I don't want either.

Agreed, There is rarely a product of service today without a competitor, and if I'm using a fake email address, its likely I am just checking the service out, and didn't want to make a commitment yet anyway.

Force my hand that early in the game, you just loose my business.

The one I use isn't on it, and thank goodness.

I use an email proxy exactly because I'm trying to protect my privacy and to cut down on spam email, as it helps me determine its origin without exposing my real email and let my blacklist or discard that proxy email address.

There are some very odd inclusions in this list (which i think, like most of HN people should not use).

> kemptvillebaseball.com

> isukrainestillacountry.com

These seem like people's project domains or team domains, and got swept up in some sort of strange authenticity list. Unless the domains were hijacked for spam, it doesn't seem like a player on that baseball team is fake.

Relatedly, does anyone know what happened to Mailhero? I used to use them, and it kinda became a problem when my emails stopped arriving, and i miss the service.

These aren't even registered.

linus-torvalds-fuck-you.jpg to everybody requiring email except those who accept any string which validates as email.

I have seen many cases where you had to enter your email to just download something or sign-up to just take a look at a web app you probably aren't going to use. Obviously I always enter a disposable (or completely random) email and random Dohn Joe personal details in such cases. I am only willing to give my real email to the services I am surely going to use actively. If you force me I just go away.

And my actual emails (personal and work) in fact are on Tutanota and on a company domain. Whoever offers a paid product and requires GMail can double fuck off.

Seems like you’d be unable to block iCloud’s relay emails, they use the icloud.com domain. Fastmail’s masked email addresses use fastmail.com.

Theoretically, if I wanted to get rid of disposables, I would not care about icloud or fastmail - they are paid plans that have billing information attached, and in the event of severe abuse, I can contact them.

One of my domains is on here and it doesn't offer public disposable email. I wonder if there's a libel case to be made here...

Sorry to hear that. Just report it as wrong domain (link in footer) or comment it here.

Disposable email is the only reason you can sign up to a lot of things online, the amount of spam that comes from these hundreds of mildly interesting sites is abysmal. And as a result your mail could end up in multiple datadumps yearly. No thanks.

@omgmajk, I agree with you. There are a lot of bad actors out there who will misuse your information, in this case your email to send you spam. I do not recommend to use your real email on suspicious websites. However many legit websites and online communities wants real people and respectfulness of their work. So whenever you want to join a trustful community using your real email is appreciated.

How do I know whether a web site that I've never heard of before is legit or suspicious? One way of finding out is to give them a disposable e-mail address and see if they spam me or share my address. If you want my trust, you need to earn it.

Also, providing a disposable e-mail address doesn't make me any less of a "real person". For example, I've been here on HN for 11 years. I originally signed up with a disposable e-mail address (one of the domains on your block list), and only gave them my real address several years later, when I started corresponding with the moderators. If HN had no problem at all with this, why should you?

That's funny, but it still doesn't stop me from feeding you a fake redirection to a legitimate email, which is what you should actually worry about. If you want to enforce a dystopian level of authenticity on your users, you should make a whitelist, not a blacklist. Coincidentally, you'd also be losing my patronage, but I suppose that's the cost of "progress" in web development.

I've seen a few sites offer a dropdown of allowable domains, generally only ones that require SMS verification at minimum and ban VoIP major freemail players.

Aliexpress is one of these. I couldn’t sign up with my personal domain so I needed to setup a gmail one to forward.

They wanted my real address and ended up without it.

Why prevent registrations from disposable emails?

The reason people do it is because they got burned in the past with websites that started spamming them/were not as advertised.

Rate-Limit accounts from disposable emails if you must, but if you see activity past the duration of the disposable email, offer these accounts a way to transfer over to a permanent email.

As the (previous) operator of a reasonably sized community forum: A prominent user of disposable emails is griefers and trolls who use it for ban evasion.

Preventing disposable email registration pushes the bar just that little bit higher that it really helps with these kinds of users.

In fact, this is the reason we even had email verification at all (it used to be effective against spammers, but those days seem to have gone)

Suppose you are an owner of a trustful online community you built for years. Would you like people to use one time emails on registration so you will be never able to reach them out? Disposable domains (most) are public so how about password reset, updating profiles etc.. There should be a certain level of trust between website admins and users.

P.S. And yeah, I do recommend you to check the website for trustfulness. This list is intended for good guys who respect people rights of privacy.

> Would you like people to use one time emails on registration so you will be never able to reach them out?

I'm familiar with at least two of the services on your block-list - because I actively use them. Neither of them is limited to "one time emails". One provides addresses that forward until you disable them, and the other allows a specified number of e-mails, with the option to either renew a sender's e-mail quota or set them as "trusted" (allowing unlimited e-mails). I only disable these disposable addresses as a last resort - if I start receiving a high volume of e-mails that I did not agree to receive and can't unsubscribe, or if I see that the address has been shared with a third party without my permission. If you treat me with respect, you'll be able to contact me for as long as I use your site. If you violate my trust, you'll be treated as a spammer.

If you build something that's worth it, people will gladly transfer their accounts to their real email address.

Your optimizing for the wrong things. All your doing is limiting hood people with a reason to use a service and encouraging bad people to just try a different one until it works.

This is The same argument against DRM. It hurts the legit folks and didn’t impact the pirates.

Don’t build barriers for the people you want.

> Would you like people to use one time emails on registration so you will be never able to reach them out?

If a user doesn't want you to be able to reach him out, he absolutely should have a right to be able to do that.

This is a cat and mouse game. And the list seems very small. Like a fraction of a fraction.

It's almost impossible to catch them all but we should try. Anyway I hope this list will help admins to fight fake registrations :)

I think we rather should to support the tempmail services to register new domains and try to make "member control" as difficult as possible. Good sites need no throw away registration in the first place.

Note: If you want to report a wrong email domain, please hit the "Ctrl+F" in your browser and search in the list if the domain you want to "report as wrong" is in the list first. Thanks :)

If you own a domain you have as many as you want. But GitHub did some sort of check which caught me out. Not sure what that involves?

Hulu does a similar check I noticed after abusing the free trials. I think they can determine something like "99% of accounts@mydomain.com trace back to the same person" and just mark the whole domain as single-uder.

Quick, someone add your most hated mail provider to the list.

Hope it gets vetted … SOMEHOW!

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