121–130 of 194 posts
Not just email. I got 3 texts this morning trying to pitch scam jobs, not to mention the endless robo calls
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please report spam on these. The email providers won't know they were unsolicited and unwanted if you just unsubscribe.
Marketing email from an account you chose to sign up for may well be unwanted, but it isn’t entirely unsolicited. And it’s not at all the same as spam from companies that you haven’t interacted with. There are problems with reporting any and all email you don’t want as spam, especially when you’ve done business with that company. That devalues the meaning of spam and it will cause email providers and spam filter prov…
If you are sending good mail to a double-opt-in, highly intentful marketing list, then you will receive minimal spam complaints. If you are sending to people who don't want it (they didn't check the opt-in button), it doesn't muddy the water because it is spam.
That being said, there are legal requirements (CANSPAM) [1] for mail senders around the unsubscribe link, but there are no legal requirements around the report spam button, so either kind of works.
[0] https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6254652?hl=en [1] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/can...
Because it works. Still relevant, from Microsoft Research: "Why do Nigerian Scammers Say They are from Nigeria?" This approach suggests an answer to the question in the title. Far-fetched tales of West African riches strike most as comical. Our analysis suggests that is an advantage to the attacker, not a disadvantage. Since his attack has a low density of victims the Nigerian scammer has an over-riding need to reduc…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is why I have a catch-all and give each company a different address. I can just forward that address to junk¹ instead of bothering to unsubscribe. It isn't just when they ignore their own consent options for sending their own stuff, often mailing lists are hacked out of companies and become junk targets that way. Or they are actively sold: the amount of crap I get to the addresses I have registered with kickstar…
> bouncing increases the chance I'm becoming part of a back-scatter issue Bouncing doesn't cause backscatter, provided it's a real bounce; that means a bounce that is a rejection by your mailserver, performed during the SMTP transaction . The message commonly known as a "bounce message" is technically known as a delivery status notification. The actual bounce message is composed by the sender's mailserver, and can't…
It sometimes happens because mail gets accepted then put into a local queue for processing (anti-spam checks and other scans) and the fake bounce sent after that. A badly designed system (and such do exist) will do this even for messages they could immediately reject based on the invalid incoming address.
It can also happen because there is an intermediate SMTP server between the sender and receiver, the intermediate has dropped the connection to the sender before the final destination rejects, so if you want to bounce at all it has to be a fake bounce.
I don't know without checking (and I've been too lazy to test!) if my mail services properly bounce based on target address or fake bounce, so I err on the side of not causing disruption if it is the bad one. I'll be replacing Zimbra with something else (probably self-built from standard parts as my needs are much more limited than when I picked Zimbra many years ago, just mail, nothing else) for my main mail service soon, this will be one of the things to make sure I get right.
I recently realized that some websites which aggregate data on people (the same annoying ones that come up when you google your name) advertise the fact that the email addresses have been "verified", including the fact that emails sent to the address don't bounce. So that makes me wonder which percentage of spam emails are actually just checking that the email address is valid and active.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not so funny for some. One person I know, (80+) got scammed out of a reasonably large sum of money (very large for them, probably pocket change for HN). They could not imagine that people would be so mean as to feign an emergency to scam others. These assholes really hurt people.
Yep, often praying on good will or desperation of older generations. A lot of people think it's laughable that anyone would fall for "simple obvious scams" but I've met a good handful of older family and their more elderly friends who either fell to a scam or were only stopped once someone at a store questioned them as to why they were buying lots of gift cards all at once. In some cases scammers will work on people…
Check your spam box. There's probably one saying "we have control of your camera and we've seen you playing with yourself". There's usually a bitcoin address to send a few hundred bucks to so they don't "send all your contacts the video". Give it a few days and go look at the address in a Blockchain explorer. There's usually 2 or 3 transactions. I guess you send 10m emails, you get lucky a handful of times. Spam work…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also, a lot of people I suspect still have old email software (Outlook Express anyone?) which might not even have spam filters set up. It is sad because I think it isn't just gullible people generally, but those who did not grow up with computers and won't understand that "This is your bank informing you of a security breach" is bogus are unfairly hit. Other thing is that the cost of sending massive numbers of emails…
Who uses spam filtering in their email client anymore? That's done at the server level.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Correct - because the cost of the spam itself is negligible, but the cost of developing a prospective mark into cash-in-pocket is quite high in terms of time & resources. The last thing the scammer wants is for the mark to back out after the scammer has invested resources into them, and before they have realised any gains. Effectively, insufficiently gullible marks reduce their profit margins.
I would like an email service where, when someone wants to send me an email, they have to first get some hash, e.g., "{hash}.myaccount@myprovider.com". Then, in order to get the hash, they have to paypal me 20 cents. If my attention is not worth 20 cents to them, then they should not be contacting me in the first place. Further replies to the same thread should be free for some period of time (e.g. a month or so).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wished there would be some service like 'Lenny for phone spam' that will automatically keep on replying to spam emails and waste their time and resources.
This is an awesome idea. With something like GPT3 you could probably keep them going for a really long time. I have to imagine that if something like that became (somewhat) common, it would really cause some changes in how spammy sales works.