Why block email from places like Gmail?

[nathanator]

Just noticed that member email addresses aren't allowed to come from Gmail, "for security reasons". I had to use a throwaway addresss to register my account.

Is this something that could be changed, or is there a good reason?

[midjet]

We tend to get a lot of spam/ sellers from accounts like these and they take up a lot of our time to spot and delete them.

[jonjoffy]

Just registered and got to say it wasn't easy, the captcha codes are very difficult to read (took me five attempts to get it right - many visitors might have given up) and not allowing Gmail addresses meant I had to use a disposable email address from mailinator (probably like the original poster and there are hundreds of these types of services that allow you to create an email address that you can throw away after it has been used once.

Gmail is a really popular email service and you seem to be inadvertently preculding a lot of people from registering by not allowing people with these addresses. The best anti-spam technique I found for phpbb was to ask a question during registration such as 5+5, you will be surprised that no bots can answer these types of questions correctly (which are very easy for humans to get right). Anyway, just some feedback regarding the registration process which is meant to be helpful (I run my own phpBB forum and don't have a problem with gmail addresses).