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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)

#191

Post by soco »

legitster wrote: post #172
TechBro8615 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure if your comment is meant to defend the practices of the companies I’m referring to - maybe you work at one of these spam houses, I won’t judge - but frankly, I don’t care what the definition of CAN-SPAM is. Clearly everyone thinks they CAN-SPAM me and I’ve never heard of anyone actually being fined under any anti-spam law except at the highest, most absurdly industrial volumes of spam. If my email is pub…

In most of my professional career (B2B), we didn't use any scraped data in our marketing system. We relied strictly on opt-in forms or in-person event data (some gray areas existed here). However, you've unwittingly touched on one of the philosophical divisions that exist in most organizations between Marketing and Sales: Sales departments in general have a much more "liberal" idea of who is email-able. The idea bein…

This is something legislation could fix. Harvesting emails for spamming from GitHub commits is not much different from taking parked cars for a joyride: they might be in the open, but not for you.

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

#192

Post by TonyTrapp »

chrisdirkis wrote: post #156
molticrystal wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In more modern times, within the last couple months, there was the Epic/Unreal Engine Github Email Storm[0][1] at minium 60m emails, because a few hundred thousand people were getting over a hundred emails within a minute or so thanks to a user trying to get a minor patch pulled in so they could get some credit/resume line/who knows. They "@"tted the whole membership of the organization. There was a few repeats of th…

The person who @'d the Epic org owns very little of the blame, in my opinion. If you have a button that causes 60m+ emails to be sent, and you leave it in a public place with no warnings and no confirmation dialogs, that's your bad choice. The person who presses the button is incidental; someone was going to.

They are not to blame for the email storm they caused. But they are still to blame for aggressively @-ing those developer groups not once but twice in a row for an insignificant PR. That's bad form, no matter if it causes an email storm or not.

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

#193

Post by soco »

iamacyborg wrote: post #48
legitster wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually kind of clever, but only if you give us a real email address. We will often take your name and insert them into emails (for some dumb reasons around personalization supposedly increasing opens). But an email being stuffed full of spam words is a good way to get it flagged by anti-spam software and potentially hurt our sender reputation score. You would probably have to do it en masse and use real inb…

This reminds me of when I briefly worked at a major luxury fashion retailer. We were not allowed to send emails with “pussy bow” blouses as they were getting caught by corporate spam filters

Whoever named those blouses wasn't an English speaker right? Right?

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

#194

Post by hackernewds »

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).

which is the point of archive.org - if there were human discretion it would turn into modern day Twitter

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

#195

Post by lucideer »

denton-scratch wrote: post #184

This guy has a different idea of what spam is than I do. If you examine a website looking for "sign-me-up" buttons, and click them, and submit a subscription form, then you've solicited their newsletter. Whether you define spam as "Unsolicited Commercial Email" or "Unsolicited Bulk Email", it ain't spam if you asked for it.

I guess the prevalence of dark patterns in today's websites has blurred the lines here so completely that even the "technically solicited" are grouped in with unsolicited mail if the means by which they were solicited are sufficiently manipulative, annoying, deceiving or briberous.

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

#196

Post by sodimel »

denton-scratch wrote: post #184

This guy has a different idea of what spam is than I do. If you examine a website looking for "sign-me-up" buttons, and click them, and submit a subscription form, then you've solicited their newsletter. Whether you define spam as "Unsolicited Commercial Email" or "Unsolicited Bulk Email", it ain't spam if you asked for it.

I want to see their pdfs, but I don't want to have to sign up for their newsletter in order to get it.

If I find something interesting I will contact the owner of the website or share what I find (using https://links.l3m.in/ :P), but I don't want to receive an email per day/week.

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

#197

Post by sodimel »

zzo38computer wrote: post #176
divbzero wrote: post #12

The design of this blog is delightfully readable: no popups, no banners, no FOUC as I wait for a beautiful webfont to load.

That is because it is a plain text, so it does not have those problems. My opinion is that plain text is good idea.

I always use plain text for HN-related content (it preserves my connection if the link becomes viral (didn't work yesterday)), but for my "official" blog (in french) I only use html/css + my open source php backend (no js, no fancy framework...).

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

#199

Post by 2000UltraDeluxe »

iamacyborg wrote: post #62
ithinkso wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were*

No, there are. I still see masses of businesses signing up for b2b products using contact@ or info@ addresses.

Indeed. Lots of businesses rely on such email addresses in their day-to-day work.

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

#200

Post by Gareth321 »

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-…

It is unsurprising that marketers choose to define spam as "anything the law allows me to do." That is not the definition of spam:

>S: (n) spam, junk e-mail (unwanted e-mail (usually of a commercial nature sent out in bulk))

http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=spam&sub=Search...

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