What does work email even mean?
Read the docs and you'll find out. It is literally explained directly on the homepage of the service:
https://www.usercheck.com/. Should not be too hard and recommended anyway if you are interested in an add on that deals with user data. "Work email" is anything that is neither a free mailer like gmail, yahoo etc. (which are called "public email") nor a service for disposable mail like i.e. 10minutemail, trashmail etc. or a forwarding service.
Obviously, for most forums requiring a mail address that belongs to a personal or work domain wouldn't be helpful at all and massively hinder registrations. However, there is no flag or notification by this add on when signing up with a fremailer address like i.e. a gmail address on the forum and you cannot configure it either (neither in the add on nor in the backend of the service website). So either this "require work email"-mechanism is only available in paid tiers or purposefully ignored in the XF add on. So nothing to complain about.
I see that this add-on has an "unmaintained" status.
That often does not mean much. It simply means that the author of the add on
has not logged onto this forum for more than 45 days which makes the label massively misleading in many cases and does not say anything about wether an add on works or not or about the quality of the add on. In this case the add on author has been on the forums since early July 2025 - but again this doesn't say much (especially not with an add on like this that integrates with an external service that serves many platforms where XF with currently 42 downloads of the add on is not spectacularly relevant tosa it politely and does probably run more or less autonomously w/o the author touching it most of the time) and probably one could reach out to him via the service's homepage in case of questions or problems.
Did anyone try it out and find that it worked?
Just gave it a try on my test forum with XF 2.3.9 and it worked flawlessly during my quick tests. I have been thinking about something like that for quite a while as I recognized that I have a few users that used services for disposable mail addresses on signup which creates bounces or other issues later on and therefor noise when sending emails and in general indicates that these are users that one probably would not want on a forum. The free tier of 1000 checks per month with this service is plenty for my forum.
The homepage looks clean, the docs are detailed, up to date and very decent, everything is explained very transparently (really way way above average), it is explicitly mentioned that the service would be GDPR compliant and it seems to exist since 2016, so nothing to complain about until there, despite you obviously never know it it's true what's written there.
It seems to be run by a single developer from France who does currently live in Australia and has a bit of a history of creating and running (and some times selling) small web projects like this, often tied to AI in recent years. The only thing that looks a bit odd is that the service is formally owned and run by a company in Singapore (that seems to be owned and run by said developer). Probably ony for reasons of simplicity and avoidance of EU buerocracy and taxes, so understandably, but still a bit of a strange taste.
For reasons of data protection I'd recommend to use only the domain check rather than the full mail address check against this service. Still, as with any add on, w/o looking into the code (which I did not do) you do not know what the add on really does or transmits.
On the service's homepage there are the logos of quite some reputable brands listed as reference - but as always that does not necisarily have to say anything as nobody knows if they are really using the service. However: It seems as good as it can get w/o deeper research.
The service lists currently 902 services that offer disposible emails, each offering up to way more than 10.000 different domains. With that amount an API is realistically the best way to deal with the topic - you do not want to block all those using the text box within the XF ACP.
Overall this does look like a well working and well implemented pragmatic solution to a real world problem and it is even free for forums that have less than 1000 new registrations per month (which are probably most forums). So nothing to really complain about, rather the opposite, judging from the quick test and basic research.
![[Free] UserCheck - Block Disposable Emails](/community/data/resource_icons/9/9933.jpg?1748231852){kind=icon}
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