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Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users

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Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users

#232

Post by jamesfinlayson »

RandallBrown wrote: post #174
keiferski wrote: post #45

I've spent a lot of my career marketing to developers, and spamming their GitHub account might be top 1 or 2 worst marketing tactics you can use. Cold emailing rarely works by itself. Cold emailing developers via emails you pulled from their GitHub accounts? At that point, you're actively harming your brand, and may as well just send them spam diet pill ads.

If someone took the time to look through my GitHub contributions then pitched me with a job relevant to that work I would absolutely consider them. That's exactly the kind of recruiter I would like to work with. If it's obviously just a bot scraping emails and sending generic job requests, that's very different.

Yeah this - I got one of these emails someone sniffing around my GitHub not that long ago and it wasn't immediately obvious that it was a scammy recruiter, so I responded to sound out if they were actually interested in one of my projects. Got the same generic response about let's work together on something so I didn't respond.

Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users

#234

Post by shawmakesmagic »

martinwoodward wrote: post #31

Martin from GitHub here. This type of behaviour is explicitly against the GitHub terms of service, when we catch the accounts doing this we can (and do) take action against those accounts including banning the accounts. It's a game of whack-a-mole for sure, and it's not just start-ups that take part in this sketchy behaviour to be honest. I've been plenty of examples in my time across the board. The fundamental natur…

FYI I get about 5 of these a week. It is pervasive. If someone wants to scrape my email that's one thing, but the number of recruiters who are like "I saw your repo and I think you'd be a great fit for our new position in AI agents..." so they are both scraping my e-mail and all the metadata to personalize their pitch to me (poorly).

Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users

#235

Post by outloudvi »

john_strinlai wrote: post #89
outloudvi wrote: post #15

I usually check the "Received" header and report to the email service provider. Once in a while I receive a response saying the case is properly handled. These providers are the only ones that care about their reputation and thus may take some action. Investors? Nope.

the problem is that the emails arent typically sent from the main domain. in this example, the email came from buildrunanywhere.org, which is just a parked domain. the real domain is runanywhere.ai, which they arent using for spam. so, once buildrunanywhere.org has their reputation burned from reports, they will simply register buildrunanywheres.org and start spamming again.

These companys don't care about the reputation of their domains anymore at the moment they start to send spams. However, email senders (SendGrid, Mailgun etc.) care about the reputation of their IP addresses.

Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users

#236

Post by genxy »

RandallBrown wrote: post #174
keiferski wrote: post #45

I've spent a lot of my career marketing to developers, and spamming their GitHub account might be top 1 or 2 worst marketing tactics you can use. Cold emailing rarely works by itself. Cold emailing developers via emails you pulled from their GitHub accounts? At that point, you're actively harming your brand, and may as well just send them spam diet pill ads.

If someone took the time to look through my GitHub contributions then pitched me with a job relevant to that work I would absolutely consider them. That's exactly the kind of recruiter I would like to work with. If it's obviously just a bot scraping emails and sending generic job requests, that's very different.

Find everyone who starred this repo and did a PR against these 10 repos is within reach of all marketers now. I just told them how.

Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users

#237

Post by shunia_huang »

foldr wrote: post #104
unfunco wrote: post #93

I also had unsolicited spam from Vincent Jiang of Aden, another YC company. Hi Daniel, I just came across your profile on social media and wondered if you'd be interested in joining our Discord community for AI agent development. Currently, we see that agents break, loop, get lost, hallucinate, and cost a fortune, and therefore built a space where developers can share challenges and insights.

I had a similar one from that guy asking me to make open source PRs to some repo of theirs for, err, $25-50/hour. I replied explaining that senior software engineers in the UK aren’t quite as desperately poor as that, and got a canned response saying that they were looking forward to reviewing my PRs :D

Blows my mind that you guys are so expensive lol.

Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users

#239

Post by realityloop »

martinwoodward wrote: post #31

Martin from GitHub here. This type of behaviour is explicitly against the GitHub terms of service, when we catch the accounts doing this we can (and do) take action against those accounts including banning the accounts. It's a game of whack-a-mole for sure, and it's not just start-ups that take part in this sketchy behaviour to be honest. I've been plenty of examples in my time across the board. The fundamental natur…

I've received several of these types of messages including Voice.ai one mentioned in comments, and the following today:

Tonho

Hey, I found your GitHub profile and thought you might find this useful.

I've been building Omniget, a desktop downloader that works with YouTube, Telegram, Udemy, Hotmart and 1000+ other sites. It's open source and built with Rust and Tauri.

The part I'm most proud of: you don't even need to open the app. Just press a hotkey and it grabs whatever video you're watching.

I've been working on this for a while now, even got an artist to design a mascot. I'm shaping the app based on feedback from people who actually use it, so if you have any thoughts I'd love to hear them.

Here's the repo: https://github.com/tonhowtf/omniget

Thanks for your time!

Tonho

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