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A little trick to spam the spammers (2021)

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Re: A little trick to spam the spammers (2021)

#21

I run marketing email databases. This is cute, but it doesn't actually do anything in most systems - either the employees all already get the marketing emails or there is a system-wide rule to suppress against the email domain. If you actually want to (potentially) break something, try submitting some obscure characters or malformed html into some fields. Blank spaces in emails can particularly be a nuisance. And if…

The zero-width char seems to be a good candidate, thanks !

Re: A little trick to spam the spammers (2021)

#22

The trick works in analog too. Just stuff the pre-paid business reply mail with other junk mail.

Similarly, when a store annoys me for an address or phone number, and won't take "no" for an answer, I look it up on Google Maps and give the clerk the store's information.

Edible Arrangements is the most recent place this happened. The store wouldn't sell anything to me without an address and phone number, even though I was paying cash. The manager said the POS wouldn't even let him start a transaction without collecting the information.

So Edible Arrangements' marketing department is now spamming my local Edible Arrangements store.

Re: A little trick to spam the spammers (2021)

#24

I've wondered if thats why I can't always sign up for a webpage using their domain before the @ (ex. ycombinator@personaldomain.com). In that somebody else already signed up using webmaster@ycombinator.com and so in response they reject any emails containing "ycombinator".

This seems like a weird and computationally expensive validation to perform, but it does explain your observation.

Re: A little trick to spam the spammers (2021)

#25
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12951917

DonHopkins on Nov 14, 2016 | parent | context | favorite | on: The NHS's 1.2M employees are trapped in a 'reply-a...

Back in the days of ARPANET mailing lists, there used to be an "educational" mailing list called "please-remove-me", that was for people who asked an entire mailing list to remove them, instead of removing themselves, or sending email to the administrative "-request" address.

So when somebody asked an entire mailing list to remove them, somebody else would add them to the "please-remove-me" mailing list, and they would start getting hundreds of "please remove me" requests from other people, so they could discuss the topic of being removed from mailing lists with people with similar interests, without bothering people on mailing lists whose topics weren't about being removed from mailing lists.

It worked so well that it was a victim of its own success: Eventually the "please-remove-me" mailing list was so popular that it got too big and had to be shut down...

...Then there was Jordan Hubbard's infamous "rwall incident" in 1987:

http://everything2.com/title/Jordan+K.+Hubbard

Re: A little trick to spam the spammers (2021)

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run an email marketing database. You might be pleased to know we keep a little "wall of honor" of the best fake emails we've been given.

Care to share any?

Most of them are just various conjugations of swearwords or attempted script injections.

Re: A little trick to spam the spammers (2021)

#27

I run marketing email databases. This is cute, but it doesn't actually do anything in most systems - either the employees all already get the marketing emails or there is a system-wide rule to suppress against the email domain. If you actually want to (potentially) break something, try submitting some obscure characters or malformed html into some fields. Blank spaces in emails can particularly be a nuisance. And if…

A trick I like is to fill every form with "null".

Re: A little trick to spam the spammers (2021)

#28
post #17

I wonder if most sites maintain any of the following addresses or not for externally incoming mail: hostmaster@ postmaster@ webmaster@ dns-admin@ info@ contact@ root@ (And if they do, if anyone is actually reading the mail coming to those addresses.) I used to but I got so much spam and 0 actually legit mails to these addresses on my own domains so I stopped accepting externally incoming mails for those names/aliases…

Every email to legal@ has to be read by any legitimate site, thanks to GDPR/CCPA. Not that you'll get a response.

Could you give references for this?

Re: A little trick to spam the spammers (2021)

#29
post #8

I've been entering in short complaints as email addresses for a while now. My hope is that the right person will see "whythehhellwouldisignupforyournewsletterafter10seconds@nevercoming.back" and get the message.

I run an email marketing database. You might be pleased to know we keep a little "wall of honor" of the best fake emails we've been given.

> the best fake emails we've been given

If I were to do this, the email wouldn't be fake!

I have hundreds of email aliases on my (main) domain, and the list keeps on growing.

Re: A little trick to spam the spammers (2021)

#30

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12951917 DonHopkins on Nov 14, 2016 | parent | context | favorite | on: The NHS's 1.2M employees are trapped in a 'reply-a... Back in the days of ARPANET mailing lists, there used to be an "educational" mailing list called "please-remove-me", that was for people who asked an entire mailing list to remove them, instead of removing themselves, or sending email to the administrative…

Reminds me of Bedlam DL3 at Microsoft:

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/exchange-team-blog/me...

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