We’ve had a recent flood of registration attempts with email addresess looking like @services.cn that are filling up our MTA queue as non-deliverable. My understanding is that there is no way to block domains using wildcards ( as per Use of an asterisk in blocked email domains prevents registration…

Discourse does not support wildcards in the blocked email domains list, so blocking entire domain patterns like @services.cn is not possible directly. However, there are several measures you can take to reduce or prevent these spam registration attacks: Reduce “max new accounts per registration IP…

We ended up blocking those addresses at the postfix level

That’s a smart move! What was the wildcard that worked? [image] jahan_gagan: Manually Block Known Bad Domains While wildcards are not supported, you can explicitly add problematic domains to your “blocked email domains” list. I wonder why this did not work? Maybe there is a case to be made …

I replied by mail but don’t see my reply here, no time to dig it up now and the web UI doesn’t let me just type preformatted text (I hate it!) so you’ll have to guess :slight_smile:

WDYM you can’t type preformatted text? strk says the wildcard was /.*@service\..*\.cn/.

Welcome to meta, @lnicola ! :sunflower: @strk maybe you are not familiar with how preformatted text works in Discourse. There are multiple ways to do it and it’s quite powerful once you learn how. See: Posting code or preformatted text

@tobiaseigen there’s a little bug, though, if I copy that regex as text and paste it in Discourse, it gets mangled to /.@service...cn/ (the backslashes are lost).

We are veering into off topic territory here! :rofl: What you are seeing there is not a bug, but intended markdown behavior. Two asterisks surrounding text displays the text as italics. Because it includes an @ it is displayed as an invalid @username. Once you surround the regex in backticks it di…

It doesn’t work for me: paste /.*@service\..*\.cn/into a plain-text editor, copy it back open a backtick on Discourse, paste, you get /.@service...cn/ paste as plain text (Ctrl-Shift-V) in backticks, you still get /.@service...cn/ if you copy as HTML (from my comment above), pasting works fine

Blocking spammer.<random>.domain registration attempts

Product Support

tobiaseigen (Tobias Eigen) September 29, 2025, 8:19pm 3

Sandro, were you able to resolve your issue?

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Blocking spammer.<random>.domain registration attempts

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