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Thought on users using instant emails

  • 2 October 2020
  • 4 replies
  • 49 views

Hi guys!

We’ve started seeing new type of behaviour in our community lately. We see users that are using instant / temporary emails from services such as mirai.re.

If users start registering with temporary emails, they are basically staying anonymous and that’s obviously something we do not want :thinking:

 

Has anyone else experienced this? Any thought on this?

 

BTW; now I understand our users’ frustration on their inability to fix typos on their topic titles. How annoying!

4 replies

Userlevel 3
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Hey Suvi,

thanks for sharing this here!

Usually, we see this behaviour around spammers, who try to quickly create accounts. Hence, for the inSided login (not SSO login via company pages), we block already some of those known to be used by spammers.

So if I understand you correct, these are genuine users with legit motivation to be on the community?

We could block this domain specificially for your community, to prevent users registering with this domain. Let us know if you’d like us to do that and I will add it to your blacklist.

And yes, I would also like to give you the option to fix your own title - it would be less work for me. 😃 But I don’t seem to spot the typo here, or is it something you’d like to optimize? Will share your feedback with the team!

Userlevel 2
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Hey @Julian ,

 

yes indeed, they (or at least some of them) seem to be legit users. That’s the reason why I brought this up…

 

At least for now, maybe the wisest thing is to block this domain.

Ps. I wanted to have “Thoughts” instead of “Thought” in my title :D

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My opinion on “throwaway email addresses”:

From the users’ point of view (as I’m a user on several social networks and communities myself) I want to keep control over the websites who have my personal data and over the emails I receive. So as soon as I’m using a throwaway email address I’m aware of the consequences that I might miss relevant information.

From the communities’ point of view I’m with you: I’d very much prefer to have a 100% certainty that all email addresses are valid and regularly checked so my efforts regarding engagement, activation, gamification etc. aren’t lost on them.

My approach as the community admin is: I don’t limit the users’ ability to use throwaway email addresses as this shows they are taking active steps to protect their personal information and (inbound) communication. And because they are doing it, I need to assume that they aren’t really open to my efforts of keeping in touch with them in the first place. So I’m saving myself the trouble of creating a blacklist when this would lead to two things:

  1. Less users registering (because the users go away when they realize they can’t use a throwaway address)
  2. More of the community’s emails are being sent into a black hole (personal filters in the users’ email programs)
Userlevel 2
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Thanks for your thoughts @bjoern_schulze - I really do appreciate it! I myself have never used this type of services, so for me this was a new thing.

We’ve had some experiences on users trolling our community, so we’re “playing it safe”. But I am really curious to hear if some other communities experience this also!

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