On one of my sites, we’ve got persistent spam/phishing coming in from a single source which I’m struggling to prevent. It gets in via an email-in to a group inbox. It uses a different email and IP address each time, but the content is almost identical each time. It claims to be from CommSec (a wel…

Email-in topics/posts go through a very similar path as regular post creation, so AI spam would most likely cover you. [image] nathank: I tried making ‘Commsec’ a not-allowed username, but Discourse still lets that through. Just confirming, did you go through the “reserved usernames” site se…

I think you need to rely on ai spam detection (or maybe try moving detection upstream to the mail receiver if you’re really clever). I bet (but don’t really know) that the stuff that lets email in with staged users work bypasses some normal stuff. Do you not have the ai spam detection set up?

[image] nat: Just confirming, did you go through the “reserved usernames” site setting? Correct! I wasn’t exact with my description sorry. Yes, a staged user is created with that reserved username. I’m not quite sure how. If that username is taken, it gets the username ‘Commsec1’ etc. I agr…

[image] nathank: No, not yet. This is a small, low budget site and I don’t want to add complexity without due reason. This could be it!! I’ve tried OpenRouter’s free Gemini model with AI spam detection and it went without a hitch.

Is the text they send always similar? Then the flag option of watched words could help. I think that one also works on messages. There is also the Approve unless staged site setting, but I don’t remember if that works on PMs. But I don’t think any of them are as effective and restrict regular user…

What is the best way to deal with recurrent email-in spam?

Product Support

NateDhaliwal (Nate Dhaliwal) August 13, 2025, 10:03am 5

I’ve tried OpenRouter’s free Gemini model with AI spam detection and it went without a hitch.

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What is the best way to deal with recurrent email-in spam?

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