Prevent multiple registrations from the same email using + character

Question

Gmail and other email services allow users to extend their address using the + (plus) character.

For example, mail to

[email protected]

[email protected]

[email protected]

will all be receivable by the owner of [email protected]

In its default configuration, Drupal 7 would allow the owner of [email protected] to register 3 separate accounts using the 3 addresses above... and more if they want!

I would like to prevent this type of multiple registration.

While I could just create a rule that blacklists email addresses containing the + character, there are legitimate uses of this.

I would prefer to be able to check for other equivalent email addresses, where in the above example, all 3 addresses are equivalent, because they are all collectable by [email protected], and allow only one of them.

Is there some way to do that?

Answer 1

Create a second field for users that stores only real email address (everything before the +).

then use a user registration preprocess hook to check if that exists already with a simple database query.

https://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/modules!user!user.api.php/function/hook_user_presave/7.x

Answer 2

Check email before register user with add your custom validator in hook_form_alter, then check user email without +secondpart :

As a Example you can Try something like this (I didn't test this but it can give you a good clue to achieve what you want )

 function YOURMODULENAME_form_alter(&$form, &$form_state, $form_id){
       if ($form_id == "user_register_form") {
            // add your custom validator
            $form['#validate'][] = 'my_custom_email_validate';
       }
     }

in your custom validator check it with regular expression

function my_custom_email_validate($form, $form_state, $form_id){
    // dpm($form_state['values']);
    $mail = $form_state['values']['mail'];
    preg_match_all('/(.*)\+.*(@.*)/',$mail,$matches);
if($matches){
    // this mean it has  xxx+xx@xxx pattern
    $clean_mail = $matches[1][0].$matches[2][0];
    $user_load = user_load_by_mail($clean_mail);
    if($user_load){
        form_set_error('mail',t('Sorry,This email used before.don\'t waste your time dear spammer'));
        return false;
 }
}

Answer 3

Or for modern Drupal versions, see this module to prevent duplicate registration:

https://www.drupal.org/project/unwanted_email_registration

Answer 4

I actually found a module that solves this problem already: Duplemail.

This doesn't actually answer my problem just yet, because I found it's incompatible with LoginToboggan, which seems to bypass the validate method that Duplemail hooks onto. Since LoginToboggan is already deployed...

So... I'm going to try Email Registration and Duplemail to see if this solves the issue