[pedigree]

Originally Posted by Alfa1

Yes, but this also seems to check the validity of email addresses, which is a big plus. Maybe this can be combined with vbstopforumspam?

Sure it could but the problem with a single source of active SMTP scanning is that mail servers could just block connections or worse, tarpit them by reducing the TCP window size to 0, therefore just killing any scanning machine thats busy and invalidating any results, possibly timing out causing unhandled errors... if I ran a mail server and had it hit by a non-stop mail scanning site, it would get the tarpit treatment.

Take gmail for example, it waits to the end of the conversation before rejecting email addresses. This could pass email testing but be an invalid email address. Other sites will just accept everything and bin non-valid recipents later. Lets not forget (and I havent looked at the source) you can have a mail server running without a MX record. stopforumspam.com does tests to govern if an email is a valid format but it doesnt connect to a remote server to test if we got a 220/451/452 result code.

A single point for email scanning isnt a great method, as much as I like making it hard for spammers. By doing active scanning, your results are skewed by the remote end which you have no control over. vBulletin already has a method for controlling email validity, in that you must confirm a registration. For those sites without email confirmation, well, they deserved to get spammed really. While this doesnt stop a member registering to that point and hoping that their details will still be visible somewhere, email tests could be done on your server in a more distributed manner. There is no reason why those results couldnt then be submitted to a central site for further testing.

Im not trying to rag on anyones effort, god knows I had enough myself when I released my mod but Im just playing devils advocate