Are all the same email address, spammers can use one gmail address to make unlimited accounts easily.
Blocking an address with wildcards like below I believe would be a good solution: e*x*a*m*p*l*e*@gmail.com
I don’t necessarily think that all registrations using these gmail address variations should be blocked, just that it would be useful that if a gmail address is blocked, all variations are blocked too or that we can manually add a wildcard gmail to the email blacklist.
Yes it’s an actual problem I’m experiencing, I have spammers regularly making tens of thousands of accounts per single gmail account with the dot method and a sufficient pool of IPs.
I’m only seeing the dot trick being used, not 100% sure about if the + method works also. Last I checked it was possible to register using email addresses with + characters, so that trick should work too.
Can make 16,777,216 unique email addresses using the dot method only and essentially unlimited using the + method. Makes it super efficient for spammers. Domain blacklist isn’t viable seeing it’s gmail.
If this was actually implemented with a wildcard-like approach (instead of being handled automatically by Discourse), you’d probably want to be much more specific than e*x*a*m*p*l*e*@gmail.com. Doing it that way could result in blocking innocent people, especially if the spammer’s email address is relatively short. Looking specifically for . and + would probably be much safer.
I don’t understand your math. You can add only a single dot between characters, so each N-character address is good for only 2*n addresses. You could probably have a plugin that saved or compared against the dot-removed address and disallowed +addresses.
@pfaffman - I was just going off the figures given from Gmail Dot Trick Generator which is for every additional character above 2 the amount of addresses is doubled (it freezes at about 8k though).
I think 2*n, if I understand what you mean by this (as in a 26 character address would have 52 combinations?) would be too low. As they can add multiple dots throughout the address.
E.g: constantinehamilton1337x@gmail.com con.stantinehamilton1337.x@gmail.com co.nst.antineh.amilton1.3.37x@gmail.com constantineh.a.m.ilto.n13.37x@gmail.com c.o.nsta.ntinehamil.ton1337x@gmail.com
Anyhow, whatever the exact figure is, it’s a lot. Yeah, your suggested solution would make sense!