[deleted]
How to get gmail.com banned (2011)
11–20 of 65 posts
Re: How to get gmail.com banned (2011)
#12So much fun to read. Great post, thank you.
Re: How to get gmail.com banned (2011)
#13"Thousands of people use Mailinator everyday, so clearly, its a useful tool that many sites accept" How many of you would have an outright revolt on your hands from your QA/QE folks if you banned mailinator? I think everyplace I worked would experience this same issue if we did this.
Could use + in the first part of email such as: youremail+blahblah@example.com to create throwaways. most sites consider those to be different email address then youremail@example.com for account purposes but email service, who respect the rfc, will threat them as the same.
Re: How to get gmail.com banned (2011)
#14Here's a list of disposable email domains if you'd really like to block them: https://github.com/lavab/disposable I would go one step further and look for {spam_words} in "username+{text}@{googledomain}.com", where spam_words can be "junk", "spam", etc. This is like a very narrow edge case, but still might catch something. Again, if you're into that kind of thing; I'm quite skeptical that it brings any value.
until you have a the german guy, Joseph Unker, with junker89@gmail and your validation prevents them signing up :)
Re: How to get gmail.com banned (2011)
#15A few years back we came into work one morning to find that some bot was scanning our site so hard that it seemed the lights nearly dimmed. Some detective work suggests that it was a service performed on behalf of a competitor, to get our price list (bear in mind that our catalog has a few hundred thousand products).
We were really annoyed that rather than just ask us, they had launched what amounted to a DDOS attack. So we thought about how we might exact vengeance...
After a few hours we figured out a pattern to the rogue requests that allowed us to filter them, despite their efforts at stealth (like, they cycle through a list of various user agent strings to make it look like there are multiple different users). We toyed with the idea of, rather than outright banning them, making our pages sensitive to their presence, so that when we detected them, we'd display a false price, defeating their whole operation.
We finally just decided to take the high road, temporarily banning any rogue IP addresses we detected (we couldn't make it permanent because many of the requests came from the Amazon cloud, from which we also receive some legitimate requests)
EDIT: you wouldn't think that requests for a few hundred thousand products would amount to a DDOS, but the bot was rather poorly written and grossly inefficient in the way it walked through the list.
Re: How to get gmail.com banned (2011)
#16A few years back we came into work one morning to find that some bot was scanning our site so hard that it seemed the lights nearly dimmed. Some detective work suggests that it was a service performed on behalf of a competitor, to get our price list (bear in mind that our catalog has a few hundred thousand products). We were really annoyed that rather than just ask us, they had launched what amounted to a DDOS attack…
I built a system called caltrops that did almost exactly that. As a given session's requests grew more and more suspicious, their data would skew from reality further and further. A real user on the line would notice immediately (and the more real-looking the user interactions, the more it would reduce suspicion), but competitors scraping our data would get pretty deliciously bunk data.
Re: How to get gmail.com banned (2011)
#17Wow. Do my daily HN scan for the day and find an article you wrote ~4 years at #1. I hadn't read that in many years, and what fun to do a re-read. Thanks Internet - don't stop being you.
I was sad to see that the link to the domain generator was broken. The new one on the home page is a div that's generated server-side. I hope you don't mind that I wrote a quick one-liner to see if you're still detecting bots... @bobmail.info @zippymail.info @thisisnotmyrealemail.com @spamhereplease.com @safetymail.info @suremail.info @mailinator2.com @spamherelots.com @mailinator2.com @spamhereplease.com @spamherelo…
I tried something similar and got a similar pattern. After a few changes, I just started seeing mailinator and mailinator2 over and over.
Re: How to get gmail.com banned (2011)
#18"Thousands of people use Mailinator everyday, so clearly, its a useful tool that many sites accept" How many of you would have an outright revolt on your hands from your QA/QE folks if you banned mailinator? I think everyplace I worked would experience this same issue if we did this.
Could use + in the first part of email such as: youremail+blahblah@example.com to create throwaways. most sites consider those to be different email address then youremail@example.com for account purposes but email service, who respect the rfc, will threat them as the same.
I've always found this to be such an odd option. If the concern is people spamming you or selling your email address, how does this really help? Anyone intentionally doing nefarious things can just add a simple regex to strip the garbage.
Re: How to get gmail.com banned (2011)
#19"Thousands of people use Mailinator everyday, so clearly, its a useful tool that many sites accept" How many of you would have an outright revolt on your hands from your QA/QE folks if you banned mailinator? I think everyplace I worked would experience this same issue if we did this.
Could use + in the first part of email such as: youremail+blahblah@example.com to create throwaways. most sites consider those to be different email address then youremail@example.com for account purposes but email service, who respect the rfc, will threat them as the same.
Many sites won't accept email addresses with + in them, because many devs have extremely wrongheaded ideas about validation.
I used to have a first.m.last@university.edu address and that one was touch-and-go as well due to the fact that the mailbox had two .'s in it. I actually had to file a support request to get Amazon Student to accept it, even. Nobody from a university with that scheme ever registered before?
For the record, the gold standard for email validation is "send a confirmation link and see if they click it". Don't try and get fancy.
One other trick is that Gmail ignores .'s in addresses entirely. first.last@gmail.com is the same as firstlast or f.irstlast.
Re: How to get gmail.com banned (2011)
#20Here's a list of disposable email domains if you'd really like to block them: https://github.com/lavab/disposable I would go one step further and look for {spam_words} in "username+{text}@{googledomain}.com", where spam_words can be "junk", "spam", etc. This is like a very narrow edge case, but still might catch something. Again, if you're into that kind of thing; I'm quite skeptical that it brings any value.
until you have a the german guy, Joseph Unker, with junker89@gmail and your validation prevents them signing up :)
Or someone from Scunthorpe (cf the "Scunthorpe Problem").