Ask HN: How to get lots of spam, fast?

#1

Post by timbowhite » Sat, May 30, 2015, 4:44 PM UTC

I'm working on a spam control plugin and I need to test it. Ideally, I need hundreds to thousands of emails, from different senders, delivered to my test email account.

Are there any tools or methods available for this? I haven't found anything, I imagine because such a tool would be rife for abuse.

Re: Ask HN: How to get lots of spam, fast?

#2

Post by ColinWright » Sat, May 30, 2015, 4:53 PM UTC

I have a lot of spam gathered over many years. It would need washing to remove my addresses from it, but there's a chance I could provide you with a corpus.

I would need more details about what you're doing, and some assurances about what you would do with the data. What do you actually need? Do you need all the headers? It would be easier if I only needed to provide the bodies.

I would need to look at the data I have, and I might withdraw this offer if it would be too much work. In the meantime, perhaps you could think carefully about exactly what you need.

You can contact me via the email address in my profile. It might take a day or two for me to reply.

Re: Ask HN: How to get lots of spam, fast?

#3

Post by DanBC » Sat, May 30, 2015, 4:56 PM UTC

Put the unmunged address in the from and reply-to header of a Usenet client and make a few posts to Usenet.

Ditto some email lists.

Websearch news.admin.net-abuse.sightings

Re: Ask HN: How to get lots of spam, fast?

#4

Post by mattkrea » Sat, May 30, 2015, 5:02 PM UTC

Host a tor relay. I run two and put my email up as the maintainer and now I consistently get over 200 messages a day (I've since shut down my private mail server it was so bad).

Re: Ask HN: How to get lots of spam, fast?

#5

Post by skidoo » Sat, May 30, 2015, 5:04 PM UTC

Post a blatantly Liberal view on any article linked at the Drudge Report, with target email applied to whatever sign-in.

Re: Ask HN: How to get lots of spam, fast?

#6

Post by [deleted] » Sat, May 30, 2015, 5:06 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: How to get lots of spam, fast?

#7

Post by austenallred » Sat, May 30, 2015, 5:08 PM UTC

Post that your company just got funded in CrunchBase :)

But in all seriousness, look at blackhatworld.com (where the spammers gather) and look at how they scrape and spam email addresses (search for "email method"); there are a few ways that everyone else is copying, and you could get your email in there.

Re: Ask HN: How to get lots of spam, fast?

#8

Post by 0x0 » Sat, May 30, 2015, 5:14 PM UTC

Report a bug to Debian on http://bugs.debian.org and wait 20 minutes.

Re: Ask HN: How to get lots of spam, fast?

#9

Post by nickphx » Sat, May 30, 2015, 5:24 PM UTC

Purchase recently expired domains. Spamhaus does it, domain registrars collude with Spamhaus and threatwave/bounce.io.

Re: Ask HN: How to get lots of spam, fast?

#10

Post by vmp » Sat, May 30, 2015, 5:36 PM UTC

Run a simulated OpenRelay https://github.com/schumann2k/SpamTrap but instead of dropping all mail, redirect it to your target account. Might take a few days to weeks to get started though.