A sports message board I belong to recently put in a new rule.
“You will have to register before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. Due to abuse, free emails such as, but not limited to, hotmail, gmail, yahoo and AOL are no longer allowed.”
Thankfully, I have registered previously with a free email account. Still, I think this is a bit of an overreaction. Sure, once or twice every year, I’ll see some idiot register and then start trash talking. Of course, I’m not on that board 24/7 so it might happen more than I am aware of. I guess there could be a lot of spammers who register as well.
Still, except for my work email, I don’t have any other email addresses except for yahoo, gmail, and hotmail. I’d be pretty annoyed at this rule. I probably have email through my ISP, but I’ve never set it up.
I assure you, it happens much, much more frequently than you’re aware of. And the email domains you list are indeed the primary offenders.
I have a couple of Hotmail accounts myself, and yes, I enjoy and appreciate them. But as part of the moderation staff here, I can tell you that if we banned people from those email domains, we’d probably block about 95% of the spammers before they even register.
Yes, we appreciate that it would be a pain for a great many of our users. But sometimes (especially before we got some of our current tools) we dream of doing this.
I get that most spammers will use free email accounts (duh, why would they spend money on an ISP-based email address to just bug the shit out of people?), but I’d say that most of the actual tech-savvy people I know use free email accounts as well.
Why would I want to tie my online stuff to an email address that’s subject to change? When I lived with my parents, we had WOW cable (which is awesome) and internet. When I first moved out, I was only able to get Comcast (which sucks). Now that I’m married, we’re lucky enough to live in an area where we can get WOW. Do you know how much of a pain in the ass it is to change your email address everydamnwhere when you change ISPs?
It’s far easier to have a gmail account. It doesn’t care where you live or what ISP you have.
If you shut down signups completely, you’d stop spam altogether. Yay!
I definitely have sympathy for message board administrators, having held similar roles in the past. However, I personally don’t think that a blanket ban on free email addresses is an appropriate policy (and no, I don’t use a free email address). Some of the boards I have accounts on require you to write a couple of sentences about who you are and/or why you’re interested in the board. I prefer that kind of setup – it seems both less likely to exclude innocent people and more likely to stop blatant spammers. However, it’s also more work for the administrators because they need to actually read the things and approve posters.
At the end of the day, running a message board is hard work, and banning free email addresses is one (probably pretty effective way) of reducing that workload. I think it’s also kind of lazy, but YMMV…
When I first read the OP, I thought “where on earth would you even GET a non-free email address, unless it was through work?” I never would have thought of using my ISP email. I’ve never even looked at it and I’d have to call Comcrap to even find out where to find it. And there’s no way I would use a work email to sign up for a sports message board. Especially since I’m in a contract position. (which is a fancy way of saying it’s a long-term temp job)
Exactly. I’ve had my hotmail address for over a decade. And unless there’s some drastic change, I’ll have my hotmail account for the foreseeable future, even if I start using some other account for my primary email.
That seems like a good idea. Perhaps requiring them to fill out a short profile would work also. I wouldn’t like having to do that, but if it was explained to me that it was an anti-spam measure, I’d have no problem with it.
Buy a domain for $15/yr or so, put it on Google Apps for free, and you’re done – even more permanent than a free email address (because even Hotmail could shut down some day if Microsoft decides to stop running it – if you own your domain, you can move it around as needed).
We did this for awhile on the board I used to moderate. Got some complaints about it, so we changed from a “sign up and post immediately” system to a “sign up and wait for a mod to activate your account” system. More of a pain for the mods, but the posters liked it better.
I may be wrong, but I’d guess the rejecter just has a few well-known free e-mails hard-coded. There are several lesser known free web-based mails out there; use one of them.
I once had to correspond with a guy who filtered out all yahoo.com addresses. I had to set up a free mail account at muchomail.com just for him. Fortunately I didn’t use it for anything else: muchomail suddenly and silently went out of business a year later.
“Buying” is a bit wrong. You register one, and pay someone a fee to host it for you. If you neglect to reregister, the domain name can once more become open for someone else to register it.
GoDaddy is a big provider, as is Network Solutions.
GoDaddy is advertising $10.69/year, and if you check out their deals, you can find things even cheaper. .INFO addresses for $0.89 the first year.
About the OP? If I had to use a non-free email address for a message board registration, it would be bye-bye board. We registered our own domain name so that we could be assured of having the same address forever (hopefully). There is no way I want to clog up those email boxes by using that address to sign up for things. Friends and family get that address, and that is all.
1and1 runs specials on domain names all the time. Plus 1and1 doesn’t charge for private registration which most others do
I often get banned from various sites when I log in from the Chicago Public Library.
It’ll say “Sorry due to spam we’ve banned this IP address…”
Of course it takes a few days for the site to figure out banning the entire domain of the Chicago Public Library can be a bit much then they un-bann it
I often get the “We don’t take hotmail or aol mail a lot.” I’ve never run across gmail though, I suppose it’ll become more common. I still have an old webtv address that works. I know webtv was bought by Microsoft and they told us to change over from XXX@webtv.net to xxx@hotmail.com, but I never did and the email still works. I wonder when they’ll get around to booting me off.
