Anyone remember this? A drawing of a seven-legged spider mailed as payment for overdue utility bills. https://27bslash6.com/overdue.html
A little trick to spam the spammers (2021)
201–210 of 231 posts
Re: A little trick to spam the spammers (2021)
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
There is some year, between 1980 and 1992 perhaps, where people stopped saying "pussy" and meaning "cat". Until then, both meanings and their double entendres were used (cf. Octopussy).
One of my favorites was in Leather Goddesses of Phobos. Something like:
LGOP: ... there is a painting of a cat.
> LOOK PAINTING
LGOP: It's a very nice painting of a pussy, but is it art?
Re: A little trick to spam the spammers (2021)
#203In 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…
I can't help but think of Skip the Dishes and how they have zero verification of account emails. I don't use the service and never received any spam, but I did start receiving order confirmations from someone on the other side of the country. Eventually I reset the password and accessed the account to find their phone number and sorted the whole thing out over SMS.
Re: A little trick to spam the spammers (2021)
#204https://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…
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
> replying "UNSUBSCRIBE"
Once upon a time that was the accepted albeit snarky way to inform senders they were misusing the to field and that the recipient was not interested in the message
I would definitely still use it for that, albeit wouldn't use it within a reply all.
Re: A little trick to spam the spammers (2021)
#205https://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…
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
I LOVE reply-all email storms. Used to happen a lot more in the 90's and 00's. I was on one in an investment bank and in the end the Chief of Staff for the division replied-all with "The next person to reply-all to this email chain will be sacked."
Re: A little trick to spam the spammers (2021)
#206I 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…
>some systems only enforce validation rules via client-side javascript
Terrible! It's as good as no validation. Client side validation should simply save the convenience of a wasted HTTPs request.
Surely better to send known honeypot email addresses if looking to poison an email list.
Re: A little trick to spam the spammers (2021)
#207This 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.
"Briberous"? As in, "You can't have this service unless we can add your email address to our newsletter"?
There is no dark pattern that will persuade me that typing in my email address isn't going to result in commercial email. If doing that is a condition for receiving service, then I have to decide how much I want the service. If I go ahead and sign up, I certainly can't complain that the resulting newsletter is spam.
Online shops often require an email address when I order. They send it an order confirmation/invoice or whatever. Is that manipulation or briberousness?
This phrase "technically solicited": I suppose if some company gets my email so they can send me an invoice, and then proceeds to send me newsletters daily, with no means to unsubscribe, well, I solicited the order-confirmation, not the newsletters. That's not technically solicited; it's unsolicited (and it's a shop I won't be using again).
Re: A little trick to spam the spammers (2021)
#208Reminds me of a colleague who used to input "president@whitehouse.gov" into all of such mandatory fields (early 2000's). When I asked why, his response was: "If anyone is able to do something about all that spam, it's probably him". :D
Re: A little trick to spam the spammers (2021)
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s a classic. http://bash.org/?127039 I do occasionally wonder if it would still work, but most business reply mail type spam has been supplanted by email nowadays.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220619185805/http://bash.org/?...
wait why is bash.org down