Live data from Hacker News

Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

spa.mnesty.com

141–150 of 162 posts

Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

#141

Interesting, but is there something for spam callers? It's not enough to block them or report them.

I'd pay some serious money for this. In case someone's looking for an idea.

https://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/

Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very well done. And the ducks -- hilarious! Now how do you scale and vary this enough, to prevent suspicion? That's the next step. Near the end (28 min), it felt like the caller was probing with "can you hear me" to collect Lenny's canned responses. Would it be better to hang up earlier to avoid suspicion?

"Lenny" is only 21 short recordings, stitched together into a crude sequence. It's a remarkably unsophisticated trick on a technical level. It wouldn't be difficult to produce dozens or hundreds of Lennies on quite a small budget. Tweak the script a bit, get someone on Fiverr to record it and you've got a new and unrecognisable Lenny MkII.

> It wouldn't be difficult to produce dozens or hundreds of Lennies on quite a small budget.

I'm not sure. Even though it is, as you say, remarkably unsophisticated on a technical level, it is extremely accomplished on a artistic level.

When I first learned about Lenny, I listened to most of his conversations, and it's impressive to hear how often he actually seems to be answering questions or gets distracted in just the right way at just the right time.

The writing (and acting) is just about perfect. I don't know if this is because of sheer genius, or simply lightning in a bottle, but either way I doubt it could be simply reproduced hundreds of times.

Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

#143
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could check if the MX records still point at your service, or, better yet, send a test e-mail to that domain every so often and see if it reaches your service.

Indeed, but it's added complexity and I'm not sure how many people would bother setting the DNS records I asked for. I might try it at some point, though.

I have one domain at hand that I don't use for mail at all, so people counter >= 1. I could set any MX/SPF records you want as long as I don't have to change them every two months or so... ;-)

Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

#145

I just tried to forward a lot of spam messages, and got the response: 554 Recipients' domain disabled Reporting-MTA: dns; googlemail.com Received-From-MTA: dns; ----------@gmail.com Arrival-Date: Sat, 30 Dec 2017 20:49:25 -0800 (PST) X-Original-Message-ID: Final-Recipient: rfc822; sp@mnesty.com Action: failed Status: 5.0.0 Remote-MTA: dns; mxb.mailgun.org. (54.69.170.70, the server for the domain mnesty.com.) Diagnos…

Same here. Hopefully it gets fixed, I'd love to try this out.

Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

#148
post #60

OP here. Just to clarify, because I see a lot of congratulations. I just shared the project, I'm not the author. Based on the GitLab project, the author seems to be @stavros: - https://gitlab.com/stavros/Spamnesty - https://twitter.com/stavros - https://www.stavros.io/

Yep, that's me!

You may want to add a keyword check if the spammer starts sending you back bounces:

https://spa.mnesty.com/conversations/bkpeczav/

Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

#149

Hmm. Tried it and the email bounced back with: “554 Recipients' domain disabled”

Unfortunately, Mailgun is throttling the domain due to large rates of mail. All we can do is wait the ban out, I'm afraid.

Looks like you need a new domain provider; this is a show stopper.
Post reply on HN