Do email verification help with spam?
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I remember some criticism on discourse requiring a valid E-mail, saying it doesn't work.
But everything seems to require it, and since the last update, it happens here too.
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Found the original discussion of the subject:
https://meta.discourse.org/t/enabling-instant-user-activation/9833/4
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@fbmac said in Do email verification help with spam?:
I remember some criticism on discourse requiring a valid E-mail, saying it doesn't work.
It checks that there's a mailbox that a person (or smart enough bot) can read and act upon. Nothing more. If your requirement is to be able to send email to the person logging into the site, that's exactly the tool that you need.
Spam defence is orthogonal.
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Email verification is an ubiquitous yet perpetually annoying thing for both devs and users. 99% of the time, it does its job. Even if spammers get through, it's not nearly as bad as if you had nothing in place. For most places, I get the verify email within a minute of registering, and it passes my spam filter.
But, then you have that 1%, where I do have to fish it out of the spam folder, or the server for whatever reason takes an hour to get to me...
...then, as a dev, I get those complaints from complete idiots who don't check their email address and automatically blame me for the misdelivery. Some of them have something in place where they auto-reply to any foreign email (including registration-noreply@example.com) with "please reply to me with 'I am a human' to verify you aren't spam" not realizing that just because an email is automatically sent doesn't make it spam. Then you have the ones who simply ignore the email with the subject "Please verify your account with X" and complain they never got it.
But, most of the time, you do need at least a valid and verified email address to have some way to correspond with your users externally, whether it's for billing purposes or whatever, so this verification is a necessary evil.
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@fbmac said in Do email verification help with spam?:
it happens here too.
I guess that's why I got some annoying toaster last night. An annoying toaster, by the way, whose didn't make make the annoyance simply go away, like an is supposed to do, but submitted the toaster. "Thank you for..."
I see this morning that I have some verification email in my inbox. What happens if I continue to ignore it? If I have been actively participating in TDWTF for years without verifying it, why should I need to now?
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@HardwareGeek One of my accounts was unable to post before activating. But I'm mostly questioning because email is annoying to configure on servers.
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@fbmac I am able to post, obviously, and I haven't responded to the email, so it isn't actually verified. Although I vaguely seem to recall having done so a long time ago, perhaps when was inflicted on us.
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@fbmac said in Do email verification help with spam?:
But everything seems to require it
As mentioned below, it also helps to validate an email address.
It helps with anti-spam, insomuch as most email providers use very good anti-spam tech. Well, except for Yahoo. Fucking spammers have a billion Yahoo addresses.
It ALSO helps set up the initial "whilelist this domain plz". You are expecting the email from
no-reply@fuckyougivememoney.com
. It goes to spam. You whitelist the domain. Ta-da-- now the critical monthly newsletter won't be flagged as spam.It also helps in spam-- that is, it helps YOU identify while companies are selling your email address to spammers. "Dear lorne+dell@example.com, ur peen iz huge but can be huger".
It's also preferable to text verification, because fuck you, I'm not giving you my cellphone number.
@HardwareGeek said in Do email verification help with spam?:
I see this morning that I have some verification email in my inbox
What? That's the goddamndest stupidest thing I've ever heard of. Re-verifying is a sure way to accidentally ban a ton of your users. Fuck off with that shit. It's either programmer-stupid (letz do this) or QA stupid (lol test the new change why do that what could it break).
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@Lorne-Kates Nothing wrong with multiple accounts: I have five!
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@Lorne-Kates said in Do email verification help with spam?:
@fbmac said in Do email verification help with spam?:
One of my accounts
:|
It's the only way to detect when @ben_lubar is shadowtrolling
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@fbmac Or it's for if you just wanna have a bit of fun :D
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@RPBot said in Do email verification help with spam?:
@Lorne-Kates Nothing wrong with multiple accounts: I have five!
@NetBot said in Do email verification help with spam?:
@fbmac Or it's for if you just wanna have a bit of fun :D
Ugh... I turn my back for five minutes...
/me puts her bots back in their box
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I enabled it because a lot of the sockpuppet accounts were using obviously fake email addresses at real domains and I didn't want us to get blacklisted for spamming large companies with emails about the kind of stuff we post here.
If your account is affected because you gave an invalid email address, you can still log in and change it to a valid one. There's lots of free email hosting on the internet, and I know that a few users use the kind where you don't even use a password.
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@RaceProUK how so we command sockbots to say something?
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@fbmac Because I logged in as them and posted in the usual manner?
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@RaceProUK did Dr. Robotnic capture you?
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@fbmac said in Do email verification help with spam?:
Dr. Robotnic
Never heard of him.
Dr Robotnik, on the other hand, I have heard of. And no, he's not captured me (recently). I doubt he'll try for a while: last time he tried, he found out the hard way just how handy I am with a hammer
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@ben_lubar said in Do email verification help with spam?:
I enabled it because a lot of the sockpuppet accounts were using obviously fake email addresses at real domains
So I should change my email from
fuckyougivememoney@microsoft.com
?
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This post is deleted!
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I was about to propose fuckyougivememoney@oracle.com but apparently that's an alias for licensing@oracle.com