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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)

#141

Post by gwillen »

gigel82 wrote: post #110
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).

Are you mixing up archive.org (the Internet Archive, a nonprofit company headquartered in San Francisco) with archive.is/archive.ph/archive.today, which ignores robots.txt, and is a for-profit company with unknown owners and an unknown location?

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

#142

Post by aendruk »

davidgerard wrote: post #138
aendruk wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect spammers might have given up on that. I get almost nothing for webmaster at a domain that receives plenty of spam and phishing attacks on other email addresses, and a constant barrage of spam into the web contact form.

I can assure you that they have not.

What would explain my experience? My first guess is that spammers aren’t proactively probing these anymore, and just hit them if they’re found like any other address.

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

#143

Post by makr17 »

In the 90s I was at a little internet startup, and the product guys _insisted_ that a verification loop for registered emails would be catastrophic and lead to a massive dive in registrations. Engineering pushed back, it went all the way to the CEO, and he sided with product. So we built the damn thing, and it went live, and the CEO got signed up for _everything_ we could think of. Wasn't more than a few days of this before verification suddenly became a good common-sense idea.

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

#144

Post by Tactless001 »

This does nothing to them. You’re better off giving them a real address that you own (can be a garbage secondary account), waiting for them to email you, letting a FEW emails pile up… then marking them ALL as spam in one go. Hurts their sending IPs much more than spamming an inbox they never even check.

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

#145

Post by mandmandam »

ARandomerDude wrote: post #108
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?

On a bed of money and shitty rationalisations, if they're like the other people ruining the world.

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

#146

Post by legitster »

ARandomerDude wrote: post #108
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?

Most of my job is gathering data to explain to managers and executives how ineffective our email programs are and that we need to stop emailing customers so much.

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

#147

Post by gigel82 »

gwillen wrote: post #141
gigel82 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Are you mixing up archive.org (the Internet Archive, a nonprofit company headquartered in San Francisco) with archive.is/archive.ph/archive.today, which ignores robots.txt, and is a for-profit company with unknown owners and an unknown location?

No, I'm talking about archive.org, specifically their "wayback machine".

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

#148

Post by anonymousiam »

Analemma_ wrote: post #123
gigel82 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I want archive.org to ignore robots.txt and make it as difficult as possible to remove pages from it; it would be a broken archive tool if this were not the case.

Sometimes there's a legitimate need to remove archived content. Back in the early days of running an ISP, I had some users hide links to copyrighted content with "map name" in a hosted image. Eventually the search engines began indexing these links and my net traffic exploded. I was not happy.

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

#149

Post by gigel82 »

ShakataGaNai wrote: post #112
gigel82 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Just send them a DMCA request, that's their takedown mechanism. Is it a good one? No, but that's how they do it. You see it posted about all over in their forums. ex: https://archive.org/post/1022869/site-removal-request

They ignored all emails sent to info@archive.org from the actual domain in question which I owned, with a link to a URL on the domain asking them to remove it. Don't know what the DMCA process is, I presume it involves lawyers and such.

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

#150

Post by gigel82 »

Analemma_ wrote: post #123
gigel82 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I want archive.org to ignore robots.txt and make it as difficult as possible to remove pages from it; it would be a broken archive tool if this were not the case.

I hope you never accidentally publish private information anywhere on the web.
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