WoltLab Cloud Dead Letter Email Validation 5.10.2

Prevents the use of disposable email addresses with the help of various checks.

For operators of online stores, newsletters and websites with member areas, throwaway e-mail addresses are a vexed issue. Customers are not reachable, measures for customer retention or sales campaigns come to nothing.

It happens again and again that especially new members of a community register via a disposable e-mail address. The reasons for this are as varied as the e-mail addresses themselves. Few people think about the fact that after a certain period of time at the latest, a number of problems can arise. In addition, however, there is the threat of other problems: disposable addresses violate data protection and can cause considerable legal problems for operators of online stores and websites, since they are freely accessible and usable again after a short period of time at the latest.

Besides throwaway addresses, non-existent mail servers and delivery problems (e.g. due to a non-existent mailbox) are also a nuisance, which is why it is optionally possible to check mail servers and mailboxes for problems as of version 5.5.0 of our extension (for WoltLab Suite 5.4 Beta 2 and newer).

How are disposable email addresses detected?

We have been maintaining a steadily growing database of domains used for disposable email addresses for several years. For this purpose, on the one hand, we make use of already existing databases whose entries can be considered reliable. Furthermore, we have developed special techniques that allow our service to learn and recognize new domains on its own and thus expand the database automatically

Is personal data transferred for verification?

With our service, we provide a publicly accessible database of throwaway addresses in encrypted form on the Github platform. Our extension for WoltLab Suite regularly retrieves this information, stores it in the local MySQL database and performs all checks over it without connecting to external services (Privacy By Design).

The additional functions (e.g. MX-Check) are also executed exclusively on your own server / web space, provided that there are no technical restrictions that affect the functionality.

What happens if the service is offline or the current database cannot be retrieved?

Nothing. Once retrieved, data records from our publicly accessible database remain in the database of the respective community until they are deleted by the operator of the community. Due to the fact that a copy of this database is regularly created in the local MySQL database, it does not matter at all whether our service is running or will be discontinued at some point. This has no influence on the functionality of this extension.