XF 2.1 Using Regex to block gmail spam accounts

[Dermot]

See a lot of the following types of accounts signing up, examples are below ..

s.a.m.p.l.e@gmail.com
g.m.a.i.l.i.s.o.d.d@gmail.com
l.o.t.s.o.f...d.o.ts@gmail.com
blah+lpewf@gmail.com

is using the registration regex below recommended.

/(?:\.|\+.*)(?=.*?@gmail\.com)/gm

..and is it even supported?

 

[Masetrix]

Because gmail addresses are used almost exclusively by spammers here, we have completely blocked gmail.

No matter how powerfull your RegEx will be, whoever wants to get through will get through. Therefore, completely block gmail and make it known in the registration form.

 

[Dermot]

Because gmail addresses are used almost exclusively by spammers here, we have completely blocked gmail.

No matter how powerfull your RegEx will be, whoever wants to get through will get through. Therefore, completely block gmail and make it known in the registration form.

While that is an option, i'd rather not block a popular e-mail domain entirely if i don't need to.

 

[Paul B]

Regex isn't supported for the banned email function.

You can try using wildcards with the periods to see if that would work.

 

[Jastor]

I got same issue with this spammer emails.

Simply add

*.*.*.*@gmail.com

in banned emails. Work fine for me.

 

[digitalpoint]

In case anyone doesn't know why spammers use that format for email, it's because Gmail (and a lot of other email providers) ignore periods and anything after the plus when routing email to the mailbox. As an example, the following emails will all end up in the same Gmail account:

johnsmith@gmail.com
john.smith@gmail.com
john.s.m.i.t.h@gmail.com
john.smith+xenforo@gmail.com (like maybe you want to use a unique email anywhere you sign up to track where the origin of spam if from).

You basically can have an infinite number of email aliases automatically. The problem is that for spammers, they can create an infinite number of XenForo accounts without needing to create additional Gmail accounts (they can all have unique email addresses that go to the same inbox).

For one of my sites it became so problematic that I ended up hooking into the User entity so that when the email was set or changed, it would internally "normalize" the email (remove anything between the + and @ and remove all . characters and use that for comparison for unique email addresses on accounts.

 

[digitalpoint]

Seems worthwhile to make an official feature suggestion for it, so I did that now: https://xenforo.com/community/threads/normalize-emails-for-uniqueness.197047/

Would cut one addon I have to maintain (and maybe useful for others).