https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33761

--- Comment #11 from Bawolff <[email protected]> 2012-01-17 01:11:44 UTC ---
[mid-air-collision]

(In reply to comment #9)
> Ideally what we probably want, Is a method to disable signups from certain
> domains to prevent future abuse without retroactively blocking past accounts
> from usage.

Well we could just hook into isValidEmailAddr or EmailUser (There even seems to
already be code in CommonSettings.php to block specific emails). But it appears
mailenator has hundreds of alternate domains so I doubt that would block much.

Another approach might be to change the email validation method from click on a
link (which just demonstrates user has access to email message) to hit reply to
this message (Like how older style confirm-subscription-to-mailing-list works).

(In reply to comment #8)
> But contacting blocking admins does not require the ability to send several
> dozen identical emails to a user. And surely it would be possible to construct
> a filter which would prevent emails from addresses such as "(User:x) is a 
> dirty
> Arab", "(User:y is a traitor to the Jewish people" or "Death to (User:z)" --
> all of which I have encountered over recent months.

This quickly becomes an arms race. We could certainly check to see if many
identical messages are sent out, but then troll could just change each message
slightly. Filtering based on specific phrases generally is fairly easily
defeatable (As spam email email teaches us with 10 billion different ways to
misspell Viagra) More concerningly, it would be difficult to check for false
postives - since emails are generally considered private. (Otoh, just because
it becomes an arms race, doesn't neccesarily imply we shouldn't try)

Perhaps a good first approach would be to log sending of emails, and if someone
with 0 edits sends over 100 emails, note it for further investigation.

As an aside, it appears a user is limited to sending 200 emails a day, and 100
per hour for non-autoconfirmed (via $wgRateLimits). Perhaps that limit should
be further tweaked or something (but that doesn't really address the core
issue, it just slows people down)

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