10 Minute Mail - disposable emails

10minutemail.com

5 points·dgudkov··3 comments

These services claim themselves to be a spam fighting tool. Ironically, they facilitate another time of spam. Forum and Comment spam.

I'm definitely tracking a rise in the number of these types of services, used for posting comment spam - and signing up to post on forums.

(I've even seen normal email spam - 'appear' to come from disposable email addresses. There are so many services around - easy to find ones that don't setup SPF etc)

Do the spam actually come from those addresses, or is the address just 'forged' in the headers?

creator of 10MinuteMail here

I know many services, including mine, do have anti-abuse features (rate limiting address allocation, other pattern detection and blocking mechanism), however you can't always tell a legitimate user from an abusive user. For what it's worth 10MinuteMail gives out millions of addresses for each time I hear about anyone posting spam on a forum or anything like that, so I think that the "good" users far outnumber the "bad" ones.

At any rate, ignoring the flaws in the approach that a unique email address is a good way to tell good signups from bad ones, I guess I'd like to ask two questions:

1) Why are temporary email services that much different from GMail/MSN/Yahoo/Personally owned domains/etc... when it comes to abuse prevention on a given forum?

2) Does anyone have suggestions on improving the recognition and blocking of abuse versus legit usage? I absolutely detest forum spam and would like to prevent it if I can help.

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