Are screened email partially matched at signup?

I had screened the email test-destroy@yopmail.com in my Discourse instance, and couldn’t register with test-destroy-4@yopmail.com. But removing test-destroy@yopmail.com from the screened emails allowed test-destroy-4@yopmail.com to register.

Is that the normal behavior?

I’d assume that to be true for the reason that sub-addressing is a thing and ESPs use all sorts of separators e.g. some use + while others use .

So in that sense, if some provider uses - to allow for sub-addressing emails then screening at discourse stands true.

E.g. if someone@example.com is blocked but someone+new@example.com is not then someone@example.com can still register by just adding a +new to their existing email. That defeats the purpose of screening.

So it seems like by design but I’d have a look into the code for an evidence verifying the same.

Yes, we match to a levenshtein distance of 2, so very similar emails will be blocked. See levenshtein distance spammer emails

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