Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

spa.mnesty.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 162 posts

Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

#131

Post by WalterBright »

jdietrich wrote: post #19
superasn wrote: post #9

Well done. It does get the spammers frustrated. I remember reading about a similar thing[1] where instead of emails it was automated telephone replies and the scammers were cussing at the bots and generally super confused. It did also manage to flood their phone lines making their call center useless for a while. [1] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bj8wg4/we-talked-...

Some magnificent genius has created the perfect bot for hooking predatory telemarketers. "Lenny" is a slightly confused elderly man with poor hearing. He wanders off topic, he isn't sure what you just said and he is absolute catnip for crooks. If you haven't heard a call to Lenny, you're in for an absolute treat. This call from a tech support scammer lasts an exhausting 31 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJT…

"Candid Camera" did this long ago. They'd simply prepared a tape, with generic responses in it with gaps of silence. Then the salesman would grow increasingly frustrated with it, which of course was the source of the hilarity.

Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

#134

Post by 05 »

peterburkimsher wrote: post #105

I look forward to sending many emails your way! Spam is a daily problem for me. I can't use auto-filters, because I live in Taiwan and most emails written in Chinese are flagged as spam. That includes important messages from my bank, colleagues, and landlord. Eventually I gave up using auto-filters, and I now manually delete ~50 spam every day. Being able to do something useful with that will make my spam-sorting a l…

Have you considered registering your own domain and giving out personalized emails to everyone? E.g. from_blahbank@mydomain.tld? That way, you could rotate most often leaked prefixes regularly without disturbing other recipients.

Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

#135

Post by raverbashing »

05 wrote: post #134
peterburkimsher wrote: post #105

I look forward to sending many emails your way! Spam is a daily problem for me. I can't use auto-filters, because I live in Taiwan and most emails written in Chinese are flagged as spam. That includes important messages from my bank, colleagues, and landlord. Eventually I gave up using auto-filters, and I now manually delete ~50 spam every day. Being able to do something useful with that will make my spam-sorting a l…

Have you considered registering your own domain and giving out personalized emails to everyone? E.g. from_blahbank@mydomain.tld? That way, you could rotate most often leaked prefixes regularly without disturbing other recipients.

Even better if you can filter by domain is received emails

Blabank alias only gets email from their domains, anything else goes on the trash

Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

#136

Post by peterburkimsher »

05 wrote: post #134
peterburkimsher wrote: post #105

I look forward to sending many emails your way! Spam is a daily problem for me. I can't use auto-filters, because I live in Taiwan and most emails written in Chinese are flagged as spam. That includes important messages from my bank, colleagues, and landlord. Eventually I gave up using auto-filters, and I now manually delete ~50 spam every day. Being able to do something useful with that will make my spam-sorting a l…

Have you considered registering your own domain and giving out personalized emails to everyone? E.g. from_blahbank@mydomain.tld? That way, you could rotate most often leaked prefixes regularly without disturbing other recipients.

I use Mailnull extensively, but I still get a lot of spam directly to my Gmail address that I've had since 2005.

Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

#139

Post by amelius »

wybiral wrote: post #92
squarefoot wrote: post #84

Great idea! Wasting spammers time is one of the very few ways of making them effectively lose money. Still the project needs some pseudo randomization in order to fool basic research. Some of the messages I read contained the sentence "I am a bit busy now, but I am definitely interested. When can we talk?". If one searches for that sentence in quotes Google returns four pages of references to Spamnesty. A slightly mo…

> A slightly more clever spammer would sense the trap in minutes. Spammers are going to develop anti-spam filters :)

I guess spammers make most money from the lowest IQ percentiles on the internet. Therefore, we only have to develop AI that is as smart (stupid) as those people, and spammers won't be able to tell the difference.

Re: Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

#140

Post by novafaen »

wybiral wrote: post #92
squarefoot wrote: post #84

Great idea! Wasting spammers time is one of the very few ways of making them effectively lose money. Still the project needs some pseudo randomization in order to fool basic research. Some of the messages I read contained the sentence "I am a bit busy now, but I am definitely interested. When can we talk?". If one searches for that sentence in quotes Google returns four pages of references to Spamnesty. A slightly mo…

> A slightly more clever spammer would sense the trap in minutes. Spammers are going to develop anti-spam filters :)

Seem this is already a battle of bots (example; half way through this post https://spa.mnesty.com/conversations/btenqyem/) both parts are sending a random mess to each other.
Post reply on HN