Cut down on fake emails, do a DNS check on email domain before allowing registration to be submitted

[bzcomputers]

It would be nice if email addresses submitted in either the registration and/or contact forms were DNS checked to validate that the address is associated with a known good domain excepting email prior to allowing the registration/contact form to even be submitted.

This would help cut down on fake email accounts even being created. It should only take a couple seconds behind the scene and would likely be unnoticeable to the user when registering or using the contact form. Yes, users could still spoof their address with an invalid username and good domain, but I would say 9 times out of 10 they spoof with a bad domain. If a bad domain is found the form could just show the message "Invalid email, please enter a valid email address to create an account / send a message."

 

[Rhody]

most of them use gmail or yahoo or one of the common ones.

 

[bzcomputers]

I find most alter the domain name or extension to something that would not pass a DNS check ...lets see just today I had registrations with:

yahoo.comm
sympatico.cs
hotmail.com1939149
gmail.con
hotmail.co.ukk
bbtinternet.com
hotmai.com

all of which would fail a domain DNS check.

 

[Max Taxable]

Not sure but I think xon's signup abuse add-on addresses this?

 

[Kirby]

I link this idea.

While I don't think DNS verification would help much to combat spam, I do think it could help to reduce bad user experience / support workload due to typos in email addresses.

As XenForo already does include a library that is capable of doing this it should be very easy to add an option to use it