Re:Check If Email Exists
by tdeck on Friday July 02, 2021 @01:16AM
(#27708021)
I maintain a small fee tool for creating API endpoints to trigger email alerts for yourself (varmail.me). Since it's very basic and has no marketing, it doesn't get too many users. You have to click a link in an email to even log in, but I still get bots stuffing my login form with known bad email addresses (I've googled and some of them appear in honeypot lists). There is no chance they can get in, but this is bad because my login verification emails look like spam, since a large percentage of them are sent in response to these bots. So I definitely see some value in a way to pre-screen the emails there.
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Interesting project, maybe you need a captcha to display and weed out bots before you actually send an email.
Yes, I've considered it. The thing is I really dislike captchas so I tried to avoid deploying one. I do have a hidden form field that gets populated with a secret value in JavaScript, so the bots must be running JS at least to function.