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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)

#211

Post by teekert »

temp0826 wrote: post #47
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…

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 work at a large healthcare company and we also lost email for an afternoon because of this. The funniest thing is that you get responses like: “All, I know I’m replying to all as well, but let me be the last and let’s just stop it.” … Not realizing that all those similar emails have been send in the hours before and are just now finding their way through the clogged system. It’s like a DOS attack driven by Human amplification.

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

#212

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

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…

1050 W Addison St Chicago, IL 60613

Phone (local area code) 867-5309 Name: Jenny Blues.

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

#213

Post by jaclaz »

projektfu wrote: post #202
soco wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

In the Bond saga (books and movies) and well before Octopussy, there was the airplane pilot in Goldfinger (the movie):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pussy_Galore

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

#214

Post by a_c »

Now every website has this obnoxious subscribe now pop-up before showing anything useful. Imagine someone compiled a list of website that shows this pop up, and some email associated with the domain, would the web be a better place?

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

#215

Post by sodimel »

a_c wrote: post #214

Now every website has this obnoxious subscribe now pop-up before showing anything useful. Imagine someone compiled a list of website that shows this pop up, and some email associated with the domain, would the web be a better place?

It may. It wouldn't hurt though.

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

#216

Post by 0xJRS »

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.

It's like companies who get mad when a Jr engineer drops a production DB on his first day

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

#217

Post by TechBro8615 »

legitster wrote: post #174
smolder wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

List purchases are a whole thing in the industry. It's actually a big line to cross. But it's far from a universal behavior that organizations deal in. So I will say I have witnessed some amount of "grey market" lists (Tech Target, Experts Exchange, etc). But in my professional opinion, all these seem to do is generate garbage leads and unsubscribes.

It’s not an unsubscribe if I didn’t subscribe in the first place.

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

#218

Post by lucideer »

denton-scratch wrote: post #207
lucideer wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sp…

If that's ok with you, that's cool, but I think many will differ.

I live in Europe where we have a few minor rights and such so I guess I just have higher standards for online interactions ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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

#219

Post by divbzero »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #167
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.

No navigation. Not RESTful.

I saw this comment yesterday and it bugged me that text/plain doesn’t support links. But maybe we could provide links in headers if we popularized the following HTTP standard [1] [2]?

  HTTP/1.1 200/OK
  Link: ; rel="home"
  Link: ; rel="up"
  Link: ; rel="prev"
[1]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8288#section-3.5

[2]: https://www.iana.org/assignments/link-relations/link-relatio...

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

#220

Post by jareklupinski »

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.

I'm just amazed it took this long. I think I've been in that org for 5+ years?
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