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You currently need a phone number to sign up for Telegram. Add an option to sign up using an email address or another method, like some messengers do (e.g., Wire, Matrix, Threema, Session).
Potential spam issues could be mitigated by:
Avoiding an identifier tied to your identity, hiding identity from governments or people who know your number.
Use a virtual phone number.
Warning: Do NOT use temporary numbers to connect to your account, as you may lose access to your account when you lose access to the number.
Also, allowing people to register just by using their mail would facilitate scammers & spammers and will lead to a general chaos as well. Talking about your proposal regarding @SpamBot, that would add so much more work for the moderators. The captcha thing would never be implemented, using 3rd parties captchas would be a big privacy concern and the Telegram team is certainly not going to create its own captcha. The 3-months period to lift the restrictions makes no sense, why the hell should I wait 3 months after signing up?
The main reason that made you make this feature suggestion is "people not wanting to share their identity with intolerant parents"... A silent signup feature was suggested, you should check it out: https://bugs.telegram.org/c/82
Wire, Matrix, Threema, or Session are messaging app/services and do not require phone number. Signal is going to remove phone number soon
> Also, allowing people to register just by using their mail would
facilitate scammers & spammers and will lead to a general chaos as
well.
Regarding spammers, I think that it depends. We can also think of a solution where accounts created by e-mail aren't able to write at all, but they can read. So they technically can't spam.
> The 3-months period to lift the restrictions makes no sense, why the hell should I wait 3 months after signing up?
You can sign up and read only. After a certain period of time (3 month, 2 years, who knows) you can try to solve an automatic turing test, if you pass it you can ask to Telegram Support Force volunteers to verify that you are human and want to be unlocked from the spammed position. While you are marked as a spammed account, you can't write to non-contact people, but you can be contacted and you can reply. If this is still not enough for you, we can even think of a solution where you won't ever be able to have the spam mark lifted, so this phase is permenant. I'm also ok to that.