User poll about email clients

[eCat]

Hello!

I have a user forum on a business website that sells B2B software.

Sadly, I get a lot of spam registrations. One of the things that the board's user manual suggests is forbidding posts for users that use a free email address like yahoo or hotmail.

I'm worried that there may be some legitimate users that don't use a domain-based email for whatever reason.

How about you? Would YOU be put off from registering if you couldn't use a free email account as your contact address?

[tracknut]

If the question is just *me personally* then no, I use a "real" email address. But I certainly know plenty of folks that use hotmail or yahoo as their only email address, and think of it as being just as "real" as any other email.

Dave

[wh666-666]

It seems a bit stupid to try and exclude certain addresses. I use hotmail for instance, therefore couldnt register.

Unless im missing something why dont you use some kind of validation to stop bots registering. For example CAPTCHA would serve the purpose very well and is easy to implement.

[starheartbeam]

I agree with wh666-666 about using something like CAPTCHA. This would work very well of you and not having you turn people away because of what e-mail they use.

[drhowarddrfine]

A lot of business people use gmail. I agree you can't exclude free accounts.

[JPnyc]

Absolutely, I would be put off.

[xvszero]

I think a LOT of "businesses" use things like gmail and the likes, especially if they are small indie businesses.

Personally I hate when sites require non-free emails. Especially since a lot of them randomly won't accept my domain emails either.

[Watts]

FWIW, I use a yahoo account when registering for stuff on the web because I don't want the reverse to happen to me (ie, *I* start getting spam at my real address because I signed up for software demo, etc.)

[eCat]

Thanks all!! That certainly answers my question...

We do use CAPTCHA as well as other questions that have to be answered by a human. However, we still get quite a few spam registrations every day.

Apparently, they have a human do the initial registration... You'd think the effort wouldn't be worth it for the spammers!!

Ah well.

[wh666-666]

Since that's the case, have you considered evaluating the site to make it less appealing to scammers?

[scragar]

I use gmail for my personal email, and a work based email for work related things, it helps keep things separated and gmail offers a larger email inbox than my current employers "IT tech" will allow me(I use IT tech in quotes, because the guy is an idiot, but my boss doesn't listen, apparantly I'm wrong about that, go figure)

Thanks all!! That certainly answers my question...

We do use CAPTCHA as well as other questions that have to be answered by a human. However, we still get quite a few spam registrations every day.

Apparently, they have a human do the initial registration... You'd think the effort wouldn't be worth it for the spammers!!

Ah well.

Well, given the rate of pay in some third world countries it actually works out cheaper to pay some poor guy thousands of miles away to solve a few hundred captcha's a day, than it does to get software capable of solving them, especially given that captcha's get more difficult every all the time.

[Dok]

I don't like capcha's either.

I just add a very simple question to my forms. Like "What is the 3 letter abbrievation for World Wide Web". My website is for programmers so they should be able to answer :)

I have 4 questions like this which I rotate at random. Haven't had a single spam message since implementing it.

[NogDog]

Rather than an annoying Captcha, you might consider trying to incorporate something like Akismet (http://akismet.com/) into your form validation (Developer Documentation (http://akismet.com/development/)).

[keyboardgeek]

My last company tried to ban free email accounts like gmail etc and soon had to change back. They were losing hundreds of legitimate emails per day. Implementing a spam system that uses global lists would be better. But costly :)