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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)

#161

Post by ficklepickle »

sodimel wrote: post #67
Minor49er wrote: post #3

I basically do this too, though I just put in some random gibberish (or "admin" or "info" or something) before the domain. I figure they probably have some catchall email address, and if not, nothing wasted On the other hand, if you do want a one-time piece of email, but don't want to be subscribed to a mailing list, check out sharklasers.com. It's a free temporary email service that works pretty well

I usually search "tempmail service" on some search engine and take a random link.

I use mailinator, but their domains are blocked by many services. Fortunately, they don't check if the provided domain resolves to one of the blocked domains... So I created an MX record on a domain I own that points to a mailinator domain. Works like a charm.

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

#162

Post by emmelaich »

DonHopkins wrote: post #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…

There's been a solution for this forever.

If someone sends an email with most of the words just being "unsubscribe" or "remove me" then at the least you don't send it on. Added points for auto-replying unsubscribe instructions or even just do it.

Fairly basic for a mailing list program.

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

#163

Post by ttyprintk »

boplicity wrote: post #159

I don't get it -- he's finding optin newsletter boxes and spamming the people asking for an email address? Why? Because he doesn't like optin email?

Guessing it’s the automated pop-ups timed to arrive before you’ve seen whether the site is high quality-enough to deserve it.

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

#166

Post by mixmastamyk »

bitbang wrote: post #124
codetrotter wrote: post #13

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…

I will often provide the email address postmaster@hashbang.com for people insisting they need an email address who have no legitimate reason doing so. (hashbang.com resolves to localhost. Thanks twocows...)

Why would this work?

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

#168

Post by quickthrower2 »

makr17 wrote: post #143

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…

Funny. From a "business" point of view the original decision may have been better (but evil). However the CEO made a decision for the business for his personal convenience.

I have seen this done before where we were forced to use technology that would support both Mac and Windows because the CTO had a Mac (and that was the only reason). So Silverlight it was :-/. Yes you can guess the year probably!

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

#169

Post by smolder »

legitster wrote: post #158
TechBro8615 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Log4shell was about the closest we got to this. It’s still crazy to me you could exploit an unknown machine by leaving a string of text somewhere and waiting for a vulnerable client to process it. I imagine many spammers are running a lot of insecure PHP and Perl scripts to support their operation. That was certainly the case back in ~2006, and I imagine most “new entrant” spammers are not using email but rat…

So, for the email industry (both marketers and client developers) "Spam" is used to specify emails that are not compliant with the CAN-SPAM act - they don't have a way to unsubscribe or report abuse. ITT people are using Spam to cover all sorts of junk email, but in my mind there is a difference between companies engaging in annoying methods to get your consent and organizations engaging in bad faith breaches of CAN-…

There's not a big difference between skirting the rules of CAN-SPAM with annoying junk emails and email list sales to whoever will pay and violating it outright. There's a pretty clear line between useful work and scummy opportunism which is crossed constantly by "legitimate" email marketing.

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

#170

Post by ttyprintk »

ccn0p wrote: post #107

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.

Has anyone tried forwarding those to 7726?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23314816

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