10 ms·

Mailinator.com: Anatomy of a Spammy Campaign

144 points by zinxq 8y ago

rochak100100100 8y ago
I have tried several free isposable email services, and keep coming back to 33 mail. It is simple and reliable, unlike many others. It also is least likely to be blocked my many website. Link here to signup http://33mail.com/hy6z0m http://33mail.com/hy6z0m
- probably_wrong 8y ago
  Oh, the irony...
  - hitekker 8y ago
    Surely this must be some HN user’s satire.
    - marksomnian 8y ago
      Given that it's a fresh account with no other comments, I highly doubt it.
      - deadonarrival 8y ago
        Oh, hey Mark!
  - rochak100100100 8y ago
    what's ironic about it ? 33 mail ia sn alternative disposable email site that certainly works better than mailinator
gingerlime 8y ago
If spammers IPs are so widely spread out, then doesn’t it make most IP based RBLs fairly pointless? Or worse, more likely to get false positives? Sending legitimate email becomes increasingly frustrating, yet spammers still to find their way to our mailbox.
- throwaway2048 8y ago
  IPs arent marked as spam forever, its easy to get delisted from DNSBLs if you arent continuing to send spam.
  - logronoide 8y ago
    The theory says it's easy to be delisted, but some very large Telcos have given up and they don't try to be delisted anymore. This task can be very time consuming and they only focus on prefixes of their static pool or business services. For example, prefixes of Telefónica de España have been included in Spamhaus Zen for a while: https://www.spamhaus.org/zen/ https://www.spamhaus.org/zen/. Mailinator is a hack to workaround the spam flood. But for trustable business, the anonymity of the disposable addresses is a big problem because it is not possible to start a marketing process (if you register for a trial, for example, you should be "paying" with your email to let the company start a marketing process. Marketing for a service you have registered is not spam...). More and more companies deny registration from Disposable Email Addresses. Because these users are worthless. Spam is a plague that hurts good users and trustable business.
    - Sir_Substance 8y ago
      >if you register for a trial, for example, you should be "paying" with your email to let the company start a marketing process. Sympathetic customer fallacy. Figuring out how to get new paying customers through the door is not the problem of everyone who considers trying your product. Expectations that trial users should "pay" by taking on the burden of having to tell your marketing department to go away if they aren't interested enough to buy it on their own initiative is reality denial. Obviously people aren't going to do that, and spending effort trying to "disposable-email-proof" your trial system is a bottomless pit into which you will pour money for all eternity. People are actually paying money to the disposable email companies to have them actively combat you. You will never complete that project and you will never be able to stop spending on it. Ideally your trial is persuasive enough to have a steady trickle of people decide to buy the full product, but not so generous they feel that they'll get the full experience by cycling disposable email addresses. Finding that balance is the responsibility of your business, no one else will change their behavior to do it for you. If you can't find it, maybe that's a sign that you've made a product that maps poorly to sustaining a business. One might call this the "bittorrent inc" strategic mistake. Always remember to stay grounded in reality.
octosphere 8y ago
I love these kind of writeups about services which are like plumbing for the web. If it wasn't for mailinator, managing my inbox would be a chore. I use it all the time, although there is a panoply of others to use and I suffer from disposable inbox fatigue (just as bad as suffering from an overflowing inbox).
nneonneo 8y ago
One of the more under appreciated features of Mailinator is the fact that they’ll take any mail sent their way, regardless of the email address domain. This means that, if @mailinator.com is blocked for a given site, you can use any number of aliases for it and still get through (my personal favorite is @devnullmail.com), or you can even set up an MX record pointing at Mailinator and effectively use a custom domain.
- logronoide 8y ago
  Using mail.mailinator.com as MX records are something that almost all tools check to ban disposable email addresses. The only real thing that works for them is to renew their domain pool as fast as they can. In our service in https://apility.io https://apility.io we check for MX records of very well known DEPs, and also we crawl the web to try to keep an up to date list of these domains.
  - snowpanda 8y ago
    >Anti Abuse API Why does your company consider disposable email addresses abusive?
    - logronoide 8y ago
      Some people use DEA to abuse of trial services of SaaS, for example. They register again and again after the trial has expired. These users consume resources but they never effectively become customers. Some companies ban users using DEA, anonymous proxies, TOR, VPNs... or even Free Email addresses (the conversion rate comparing a user registered with his or her company email and a Free Email (gmail, hotmail, protonmail...) is much higher).
      - fibers 8y ago
        But no one stops you from getting a domain and effectively creating infinite email addresses to register
creativityland 8y ago
Mailinator is a lifesaver. Good to see them still up and running after all these years.
mastef 8y ago
Oh yeah, so much "good day" spam recently.

144 points by zinxq 8y ago

I have tried several free isposable email services, and keep coming back to 33 mail. It is simple and reliable, unlike many others. It also is least likely to be blocked my many website. Link here to signup http://33mail.com/hy6z0m http://33mail.com/hy6z0m

probably_wrong 8y ago
Oh, the irony...
- hitekker 8y ago
  Surely this must be some HN user’s satire.
  - marksomnian 8y ago
    Given that it's a fresh account with no other comments, I highly doubt it.
    - deadonarrival 8y ago
      Oh, hey Mark!
- rochak100100100 8y ago
  what's ironic about it ? 33 mail ia sn alternative disposable email site that certainly works better than mailinator

gingerlime 8y ago

If spammers IPs are so widely spread out, then doesn’t it make most IP based RBLs fairly pointless? Or worse, more likely to get false positives? Sending legitimate email becomes increasingly frustrating, yet spammers still to find their way to our mailbox.

throwaway2048 8y ago
IPs arent marked as spam forever, its easy to get delisted from DNSBLs if you arent continuing to send spam.
- logronoide 8y ago
  The theory says it's easy to be delisted, but some very large Telcos have given up and they don't try to be delisted anymore. This task can be very time consuming and they only focus on prefixes of their static pool or business services. For example, prefixes of Telefónica de España have been included in Spamhaus Zen for a while: https://www.spamhaus.org/zen/ https://www.spamhaus.org/zen/. Mailinator is a hack to workaround the spam flood. But for trustable business, the anonymity of the disposable addresses is a big problem because it is not possible to start a marketing process (if you register for a trial, for example, you should be "paying" with your email to let the company start a marketing process. Marketing for a service you have registered is not spam...). More and more companies deny registration from Disposable Email Addresses. Because these users are worthless. Spam is a plague that hurts good users and trustable business.
  - Sir_Substance 8y ago
    >if you register for a trial, for example, you should be "paying" with your email to let the company start a marketing process. Sympathetic customer fallacy. Figuring out how to get new paying customers through the door is not the problem of everyone who considers trying your product. Expectations that trial users should "pay" by taking on the burden of having to tell your marketing department to go away if they aren't interested enough to buy it on their own initiative is reality denial. Obviously people aren't going to do that, and spending effort trying to "disposable-email-proof" your trial system is a bottomless pit into which you will pour money for all eternity. People are actually paying money to the disposable email companies to have them actively combat you. You will never complete that project and you will never be able to stop spending on it. Ideally your trial is persuasive enough to have a steady trickle of people decide to buy the full product, but not so generous they feel that they'll get the full experience by cycling disposable email addresses. Finding that balance is the responsibility of your business, no one else will change their behavior to do it for you. If you can't find it, maybe that's a sign that you've made a product that maps poorly to sustaining a business. One might call this the "bittorrent inc" strategic mistake. Always remember to stay grounded in reality.

octosphere 8y ago

I love these kind of writeups about services which are like plumbing for the web. If it wasn't for mailinator, managing my inbox would be a chore. I use it all the time, although there is a panoply of others to use and I suffer from disposable inbox fatigue (just as bad as suffering from an overflowing inbox).

nneonneo 8y ago

One of the more under appreciated features of Mailinator is the fact that they’ll take any mail sent their way, regardless of the email address domain. This means that, if @mailinator.com is blocked for a given site, you can use any number of aliases for it and still get through (my personal favorite is @devnullmail.com), or you can even set up an MX record pointing at Mailinator and effectively use a custom domain.

logronoide 8y ago
Using mail.mailinator.com as MX records are something that almost all tools check to ban disposable email addresses. The only real thing that works for them is to renew their domain pool as fast as they can. In our service in https://apility.io https://apility.io we check for MX records of very well known DEPs, and also we crawl the web to try to keep an up to date list of these domains.
- snowpanda 8y ago
  >Anti Abuse API Why does your company consider disposable email addresses abusive?
  - logronoide 8y ago
    Some people use DEA to abuse of trial services of SaaS, for example. They register again and again after the trial has expired. These users consume resources but they never effectively become customers. Some companies ban users using DEA, anonymous proxies, TOR, VPNs... or even Free Email addresses (the conversion rate comparing a user registered with his or her company email and a Free Email (gmail, hotmail, protonmail...) is much higher).
    - fibers 8y ago
      But no one stops you from getting a domain and effectively creating infinite email addresses to register

creativityland 8y ago

Mailinator is a lifesaver. Good to see them still up and running after all these years.

mastef 8y ago

Oh yeah, so much "good day" spam recently.