How to: block spam email domains
When I got some traction starting last week, the spam account creations increased. I was up to a couple per week.
I chose to have a payment step that users have to pass before they can enter the dashboard which helps decrease spam signups, but it's still annoying as I had to delete all these fake accounts.
Now that I've implemented blocking these domains the spam signups so far have been zero. A few minutes of work, instant results, so I wanted to share this here. I'm using this repo which has examples for different languages on how to implement it as well.
Hopefully it saves you spam signups as well!
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Good call, I did the same last week: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/dont-allow-people-with-these-email-domains-to-sign-up-for-your-saas-21b3637de0
Haha nice, I completely missed that one!
This comment was deleted 3 years ago.
I don’t really understand why you would want to add friction to your signup process with a paywall. I also don’t really understand why you feel the need to block disposable email addresses. Why do you consider them spam, what harm does users using them cause to your app?
Edit: Wow my iPhone really mangled that the first time.
Ha yeah when I saw that reply the first time I was a little confused...
For the paywall: there are pros and cons. The pro is this: if a customers is not willing to even pay €25 then it's likely not a serious customer. That's obviously not always true, but it's a sign that someone's serious about your product instead of just a 'tire kicker'. As indicated: I might revisit this decision as I know that some customers just don't like putting in their payment details, even customers that are serious.
Regarding the spam signups: sure I could ignore them, but I like to keep a clean database. I also don't like bots poking around in the dashboard. Many of these are out there to break things just for the sake of breaking things, as a sport. I much rather focus my time and energy on making my product better vs cleaning up my database.
It’s worth experimenting I suppose to see how it’s goes for you as far as the pay wall is concerned. But I’m at least of the belief that an upfront paywall cuts you off from users who want to try before they buy. By not requiring upfront payment information I’ve gotten more free trial users and had some users convert to paid plans two hours into their trial and some convert a week after their trial ended.
As for blocking disposable email addresses. I guess my question was specifically why do you consider them spam, not why do you want to stop spam.