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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)

#101

Post by dylan604 »

Gravyness wrote: post #27
legitster wrote: post #18

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".

It's amazing how Lil' Bobby Drop Tables is still causing havoc

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

#102

Post by rubatuga »

dylan604 wrote: post #97
sacrosancty wrote: post #92

I used to get spam from a Chinese exporter who conveniently included their actual address in the emails. One day I happened to be visiting their city and went to their office and asked them to unsubscribe me in person. The lady was very confused and first thought I wanted to buy something. I showed her the spam on my phone and she agreed but didn't bother actually removing me. Just seemed to think I was a bit stupid…

There's no better motivater than having an upset customer in your presence. I have camped outside the office of someone until a situation was resolved.

Do tell

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

#103

Post by lwswl »

nonameiguess wrote: post #74
temp0826 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something similar happened (multiple times?) when I worked at AWS when someone decided to send a mass email to literally the entire company and people inevitably reply-all enough to clog the system and bring it to its knees. Many confused people were replying "UNSUBSCRIBE" (again, to the whole company) as if it would take them off

This happened to the entire US federal government in 2014. Someone reply-all'd a mailing from the General Fund Enterprise Business System notification asking to be taken off the list, and it escalated as then thousands of people who didn't realize they were on this list did the same thing, then got worse when smart asses reply-all'd telling other people not to reply-all.

state duplication

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

#106

Post by dylan604 »

reaperducer wrote: post #22
1nd1ansumm3r wrote: post #6

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 colle…

1212 Main St, City, St (area code) 515 1212 for phone

I gave up trying to explain why I prefer not to have that info, so I just give them obviously bogus info that I can remember. Most people don't even realize what you're telling them. They just robotically enter the numbers. They just want to get on with their day as much as you do, and really don't want to hear your diatribe about big brother tracking blah blah, can you hurry up the line is backing up.

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

#107

Post by ccn0p »

OK now let's do SMS spam. I get daily reminders from recorded idiots telling me that I qualify for a low-rate business loan! How exciting! I dream of exploring who's actually behind these and wasting their time ala Giovanni Ribisi in Boiler Room. but then I do nothing and go back to what I was doing.

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

#108

Post by ARandomerDude »

legitster wrote: post #18

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…

How do you sleep at night?

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

#109

Post by the_biot »

timwis wrote: post #91
the_biot wrote: post #58

When I get spam from a local-ish company I always send an abuse mail to their ISP or email provider. Sometimes it's ignored and I keep getting spam from that particular bunch of shitheads. So I set up my .forward to bounce spam from that company right back to any email addresses I can find for them and their ISP. Every spam I get, I add another copy to the list. The folks at xertog.com currently get 8 copies each to…

Aren’t you worried about your own domain getting flagged for spam since you’re effectively (forwarding) sending spam?

Yeah, these spam-friendly ISPs might flag me for forwarding their spam. Quaking in my boots as we speak.

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

#110

Post by gigel82 »

avodonosov wrote: post #75

I do a similar thing with web crawlers that do not respect the robots.txt https://github.com/cl-test-grid/cl-test-grid/blob/873b2fa978... I don't know if this snippet is really effective, can be improved a little, especially that I noticed a couple of new crawlers that ignore `User-agent: * Disallow: /path` in robots.txt, and do not fix that even after reported.

I'll look into implementing this, nice tip :)

archive.org is the worst offender for me; not only do they ignore robots.txt, there is absolutely no way to get something removed once they archived it (despite the data including accidentally leaked PII for example - which can cause actual harm to someone).

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