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Do not use invalid or throwaway email addresses to sign up to EuroGA, and check your email address is still valid

Signing up with bogus / disposable email addresses

We have had some with e.g. grr.la or yopmail.fr.

Please be aware that when we do the next mailing (we do only a few a year, usually about the fly-ins) these will bounce back, causing euroga.org to be added to spam sender blacklists. So we block those users’ emails from future mailings, which has the side effect that they can’t login anymore!

And if you don’t login you lose a lot of the forum functionality. See here for examples.

Nobody (public) can see the email you used to sign up with. And, as I say, we rarely email them, and we never pass them on to anybody else.

So there is no need to use bogus email addresses.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Why not implement some sort of email verification e.g. by sending an email to activate a new account? Most people are prepared to share personal information such as an email address if they perceive some value to themselves as part of the exchange.

(Excuse me if you already do that, it’s been a while since I signed up!)

Last Edited by Rich at 08 Mar 21:05
EGBJ / Gloucestershire

Just realised the disposable part, please disregard previous :)

EGBJ / Gloucestershire

Just bumping up this thread. More invalid addresses turned up on the mailing about the Copenhagen fly-in.

We don’t sell or disclose email addresses so no need to use duff ones.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Just doing a mailing about the current fly-ins and again some email addresses are bouncing back as invalid.

I have marked them as such, to prevent future mailings, because mailing duff addresses just gets EuroGA marked as a spammer. If you cannot log in, contact admin with your correct email address and we will update it.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Revisiting this old topic…

Some people use these to register their account.

EuroGA never reveals or passes on email addresses so there is no point in using these services.

The problem is that when we do a mailing (usually about a major fly-in, several times a year only) these sometimes bounce back, and euroga.org gets onto a spammer blacklist so a load of others don’t receive the emails. They also don’t receive EuroGA PMs or forum notifications.

Accordingly, when we get a bounce-back we block that email from further use, which has the side effect that the person then cannot log in. In genuine cases we can fix this by updating the email address, on request.

Some of these addresses don’t bounce back but dump the email while adding euroga.org to a blacklist, which is hardly what one should be doing to a free community resource.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

I don’t know whether this is somebody doing a windup but we have recently had a number of people join up using obviously bogus or throwaway email addresses.

This is not necessary on EuroGA because we never disclose email addresses.

All it will achieve is that you will not get notifications, so various forum features (e.g. private messages) will not work. And when any email notification sent to you bounces, your account will be removed because in the much wider interest of the other EuroGA users we don’t want the server to be blacklisted. Those posters who found their login no longer works are those whose account was removed for this reason. We are happy to re-instate it if they email admin with the correct email address.

Moreover, the few emails we send out each year about fly-ins will not be transmitted because we add all such addresses to a blacklist as soon as the person creates the account

All this has been written before, above. We have recently implemented additional procedures to prevent spammers getting in and this is a part of it. Now, a new signup cannot post until the account has been mod approved. The approval is normally very quick but could take up to 24hrs. We then email the email address supplied to confirm the approval, but obviously if you used a bogus email address, you won’t get this

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Peter,

since I recently signed up and my sign-up email address might look a little “weird”, I’d like to shine some light on the background:

The address is neither bogus nor throw-away. It’s simply “unique” in the sense that I created it solely for the purpose of signing up here.
(The process of “creation” has extremely little overhead on my side, so this is actually a practical approach for me.)
All messages sent to that address properly make it to my inbox and should never bounce, so it’s a fully functional address with no strings attached.

The reason for this approach is not that I don’t trust your good intentions with regard to never abusing the email addresses of EuroGA users.
However, time has shown that even big corporations with expensive IT departments sometimes do fall prey to hacking attacks, which often cause the user databases to leak into the wild. In order for such an attack to succeed it only takes a small problem in the deep stack of technology that the forum is running on, like a missing patch on the operating system, web-server, PHP version or forum software. Working in software myself I know how hard it is to always and properly keep on top of all these things.

With a unique sign-up address such like the one I used this address can actually serve as a kind of “canary” for security breaches on the forum.
If I ever receive spam or clearly illicit emails on that address I know for sure that there was some kind of problem that caused the address to leak to the outside (or you actively working against your stated policy of not sharing user data with anyone).
I can then reach out to you and, potentially, cause a search for a problem on your side, which you might not even have known about until then.

So, what might appear like “somebody doing a windup” is actually a measure that could even, over time, contribute to overall IT security of the forum.

I hope this somewhat makes sense to you…

Cheers,
Mathias

EDTF

I have a similar set up (google apps makes this very easy) where any email sent to an address that doesn’t exist on my domain gets forwarded to me. I can use an infinity of addresses to receive email without actually creating them (but can’t send any email from them)

Thanks, Mathias, that’s fine, and welcome to EuroGA

I do the same as you and, like yours, the email I use for that purpose ought to appear a permanent one to someone looking at it. There were some others I was more “concerned” about.

A lot of forums won’t let you sign up with one of the well known throwaway ones e.g. [email protected].

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom
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