Detect web based email accounts.

[Sleidia]

Good morning to you all.

I doubt that it is possible, but just in case,
does anyone know if there is a way to detect if
an email account is web based or not, either by
checking the email address or by receiving an email
from this account?

(It sounds like a silly question, that's why I apologize
in case you feel like you can't help laughing while reading
this!)

More seriously, the only way I could imagine would be to create
a database of all the URLs of the main web based email systems.
But doing this at an international scale sounds rather impossible.

What's your opinion?

Have a good day!

 

[Sleidia]

hmmm....another idea would be to use two steps:

1) You ask for the user's email address
2) You send him a html formatted mail with
the direction to the final step written on a
gif/jpeg file.

He shouldn't be able to reach the last step with a web
based email.

Not too bad.

Any comment?

 

[AnakinPt]

It's silly, and what's the point of that? to avoid emails of hotmail and things like that? Think like this, the most of the people who goes to the web just for fun have a web-based e-mail. It's easier that way.

Do not filter e-mails, just check if they are valid or not.

This solution Sleida gave is useless, you can always copy&paste the link to the browser...
Anikin
Hugo Alexandre Dias
Web-Programmer
anikin_jedi@hotmail.com

 

[Sleidia]

Hello Anikin,

When you want to sell a service and make money
with your website, don't you think it is a good idea
to check if your users are really who they claim to be?
Filtering web based email would allow me to prevent
silly people to use the service using multiple web based
accounts.
I can't tell you more in detail about the project itself,
but I need this feature.
Furthermore, the service is aimed at business men. That's why I want to guarantee the seriousness of the system by preventing childish people to mess everything up.
Because I want the system to be automated, I won't have time to check people's address, phone numbers...etc.

 

[AnakinPt]

Look,

I'm going to tell you one thing. Here in Portugal anyone can create multiple e-mail accounts in all ISP's. These are regular e-mails. Not web-based. We could have the same problem.

If you want to filter something, send a e-mail to the user, requiring the user to reply, informing that it's a paid service, and only when you recieve the reply you activate their acount.

This can be a not so easy solution, but it's the polite one.

Anikin
Hugo Alexandre Dias
Web-Programmer
anikin_jedi@hotmail.com

 

[johnhoke]

The whole idea of email filtering is a joke, its been tried and retried for ages...

Give it up and move on to better ideas of proving identity...

---
John Hoke
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[Wullie]

Hi,

I previously tried to buy some product off a website and was alerted that they did not accept hotmail accounts and that I would have to use another account to make the purchase. Guess what I did? I went to another site and bought the product there..

I also think that this is a joke and there should be no filtering of accounts etc..

I have other email addresses because I run my own email server and I could have used one of them but it just annoyed me and I went elsewhere..

Just because your clients are businessmen doesn`t mean that they won't use hotmail, I have seen a quite a few businesses that use hotmail for their email, a lot of them won't want junk mail in there accounts for their domains etc.

Just my opinion... Wullie

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