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.

  • oranki@piefed.social
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    2 months ago

    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.

    • fr0g@piefed.social
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      2 months ago

      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?

    • Rimu@piefed.socialOPM
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      2 months ago

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

      • Undearius@lemmy.ca
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        2 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.

  • ohwhatfollyisman@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    i don’t have a dog in this race but i must say that this is quite the spectacular manner by which to throw the babies out with the bathwater!

  • chickenf622@sh.itjust.works
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    2 months ago

    Does this include people that use email aliases to keep the connections between accounts harder to make? I pay for this service so it’s genuinely not a throw away account. Just a way to maintain some privacy.

    • Rimu@piefed.socialOPM
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      2 months ago

      I don’t know which service you use or whether it is on the list. But if it’s a paid service then it’s probably not on the list. Things on the list are like https://10minutemail.com/ or https://www.guerrillamail.com/

      You’re free to maintain your privacy and admins are free to weigh the potential risk of accepting an application with a warning icon on it. I’m sure there will be plenty who ignore it.

  • Ulrich@feddit.org
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    2 months ago

    I have to say that’s extremely unfortunate that you would add such a feature. We use aliases to maintain our privacy and this is come corpo surveillance shit. Not cool.

  • ✺roguetrick✺@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    I don’t really understand the hostility to this. Do users understand why emails are part of account registration in the first place instead of letting you sign up without an email?

    • fr0g@piefed.social
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      2 months ago

      To be fair Lemmy does allow you to sign up without any email at all (or at least used to, dunno if they changed it), so it’s not surprising that this goes against many peoples expectations.