10 ms·
Tell HN: Spammed by a Hacker News Enthusiast
Someone has scraped my contact information from my profile and is sending me an unsolicted "HackerNews" newsletter.
People ... don't do that.
Yes, you have an unsubscribe link, but that doesn't excuse the unsolicited sending of a screencap of your rendering of "top stories".
At the end you say:
"You're receiving this email because you signed up on HackerNews"
That is a lie, and a tactic used by utter scum.
Be better.
========
Edit: Note that this isn't random spam. It's specific to HN, showing a screencap/image of the HN front page. And then it lies about "signing up". If it were random spam I'd delete and move on. It's not, it's deliberately targetting the HN audience, and that's why I've mentioned it.
- unknownaccount 4y agoWhy is a spam message to a publicly listed email address considered worthy of sharing or even paying any attention to?
- ColinWright 4y agoBecause it's not just random spam sent to a list purchased from a dealer in scraped email addresses. This message is specific to HN ... it's a screenshot of a list of "top postings" on HN. So as such it's different, and directly related to HN.
- unknownaccount 4y agoIt’s no different from any other spam message. Nobody here can do anything about it but you by removing your email from public.
- krisoft 4y agoOr, the person who is sending them can read this message, feel ashamed and can stop sending them?
- prmoustache 4y agoDo you really think they care? Why in hell would you put your email address in a public space in the first place if you care about spam?
- striking 4y agoBecause you'd like to accept direct messages from other HN users? And the spam is usually so minimal it's not a problem?
- krisoft 4y ago> Do you really think they care? Why I bet that they believe that they are hustling on their legitimate startup. That's what I think. Maybe they don't. I don't see how it is a problem to try to reach for them this way. > Why in hell would you put your email address in a public space in the first place if you care about spam? I don't see how this is relevant to the question. The person who put their address unprotected up for spam can be foolish, and the person who is sending them the spam should stop. Both of these can be true at the same time.
- prmoustache 4y ago>Both of these can be true at the same time. True but decades of this has shown that people and their elected gov don't give a damn about trying to curb this by law and policing so we both know given the current state we are on our own to protect us about that.
- leephillips 4y agoI care about spam. My email address, unobfuscated, has been publicly available for over 20 years. Why? So people can email me.
- dopp0 4y agoI wish I was as hopeful as you, for real :)
- oneplane 4y agoBecause unsolicited mass mailing IS spam, and spam is BAD.
- nemetroid 4y agoYes, and that’s what the ”mark as spam” button is for.
- ColinWright 4y agoNot everyone uses the mail service provided by TheBigG, and not everyone has a "mark as spam" button. My email is sufficiently esoteric as to ensure that a sizeable percentage (when last measured between 20% and 25%) of legitimate email gets put in the spam bin, rendering commercial spam filtering effectively useless.
- leephillips 4y agoWhere is this “mark as spam” button? I can’t find it.
- nemetroid 4y agoIn the Fastmail web client it's under the "More" menu item above the e-mail contents, and you can set up an IMAP folder to act as a spam sink for other clients, but it depends on your email provider.
- leephillips 4y agoYes, I suppose it would.
- psyc 4y agoThis is either the Stack Overflowiest answer or just the Hacker Newsiest.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- gwbas1c 4y agoBecause it's a SPAM sent to our community; and directly relevant to us.
- groffee 4y agoWell name and shame. Else you're just screaming into the void.
- ColinWright 4y agoSent by hackernews.newsletter@mailscarp.com
- ctrlmeta 4y agoWhat do they gain by this? Do they have any affiliate links? Adverts? Just trying to understand what their motivation behind this is.
- nlh 4y agoWAG: I think in general people think building any kind of email distribution list can be monetized, even if it's not being done immediately. Either sold off wholesale or directly monetized through adverts / affiliate links.
- aaahq 4y agoIf they are particularly unscrupulous, there is an unsubscribe link: they capture use of this link to validate emails, then aggregate and sell that information onto other spammers.
- numpad0 4y agoSounds like a university freshman’s lemonade business gone wrong
- blitzar 4y agoThey are updating their CV right now - "Posts about my business were featured on the front page of HN"
- kushan2020 4y ago
- pluc 4y agoPeople are assholes and you can't expect them to do what you see as the right thing. Welcome to the Internet!
- simonebrunozzi 4y agoSorry to hear this. Anything like this is annoying.
- shafyy 4y agoI've also received it and reported it as spam. To the person who is running this: What were you thinking?
- robotnikman 4y agoProbably thinking: "Gotta be on that sigma grindset, move fast break things"
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- blitzar 4y agoMove fast and break things. Fear is the disease. Hustle is the antidote. Disrupt Today's creepy is tomorrow's necessity.
- rglover 4y agoBy any means necessary Ask for forgiveness, not permission Crush it
- blitzar 4y agoRise and grind
- gorbachev 4y agoHiring a growth engineer.
- Sohcahtoa82 4y agoLooking for a real rock star. Someone who will snort a line during stand-up to give them the energy needed to produce.
- WhatsName 4y agoJust mark it as spam, put it on blacklists and move on. If one decides to put their business domain into the abyss of undeliverability it's a costly mistake they make once. On a different note, it might be a worthwhile idea to put profiles behind extra protection. An extra click to see contact info verified by a smart captcha might be the least breaking change. @dang
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dmix 4y agoHN doesn't publish emails on their profiles unless you do it explicitly and the vast majority of people don't do that.
- toss1 4y agoYes, and it seems GP is requesting a feature where we can publish our emails but behind a layer protective verification. We could still also do various obfuscation behind that, but it would still be an improvement, and reduce friction to creating contacts here.
- barrysteve 4y agoSo uncivilized
- sharemywin 4y agomaybe they didn't do it. if it's easy to sign up maybe somebody put your email address in the service.
- ColinWright 4y agoThat's an interesting thought, but no, it's being sent to two different email addresses that are in my profile, so it's not an accident.
- PurpleRamen 4y agoWhat if it's a hacking attempt in disguise?
- jbverschoor 4y agoThat would be Hacking News..
- blfr 4y agoI once got enrolled into a newsletter from here, I'm fairly sure and... it's pretty good. I read it from time to time. I don't like spam but the atomized ethos of no-one-talk-to-me isn't great. Someone chatting you up or sending something you might like is fine.
- TonyTrapp 4y ago> I don't like spam but the atomized ethos of no-one-talk-to-me isn't great. Someone chatting you up or sending something you might like is fine. I'm sure most people that put their email address in their profile are fine if a human person wants to talk to them. Companies scraping profiles and sending automated bulk mail on the other hand, not so much. Pretty sure that in the EU this is also a violation of GDPR.
- danielbarla 4y agoI don't mind it if someone writes me an email - it costs them time, and I am happy to spend my time to read it. But I do mind if someone uses a script to scrape my address and opts me into a recurring distraction without my consent. It's all about having an overly low barrier to entry, yet demanding attention and manual opt-out from thousands / millions of people. It's just greedy and arrogant.
- xeromal 4y agoIf someone pulls my email from my profile and messages me personally. No harm no foul. A mass distribution list is not that.
- wpietri 4y agoThat is the excuse I heard back when spam was novel. What's the harm? The recipient might want it. That sounded almost reasonable 25 years ago. Now estimates vary widely, saying that 50% to 85% of mail is spam. Extensive spam filtering is a must. Actually relevant mail regularly gets lost because those filters aren't perfect. And deliverability is, at least for me, a constant worry. A person with no pecuniary motive chatting me up where the behavior costs us the same amount of time? That's fine. Somebody paid to chat people up in high volume because they hope to get more money out of me? Not fine. Somebody using automated tools to do that such that recipients spend far more time than the sender? Not fucking fine at all. For example, consider the gaping assholes, perhaps as few as 3 people, who were behind the literal billions of robocalls for extended car warranties. Did some people like that, grateful to have their worries about their car solved for them? Maybe, but I don't care. I would like to be left alone until I reach out, thanks. And if you don't like that ethos, please go talk to the people behind the thousands of robocalls and literal millions of spam emails I've had to deal with over the years. Because you're wasting your day telling me I should be nicer to people who value their money more than my time.
- hash872 4y agoMy new anti-spam tactic is to duplicate Gmail's 'bounce/address not found' response and respond with that. Believing that your email address isn't valid, they'll stop spamming you (bounces affect deliverability) and also probably not sell your data. If you just hit unsubscribe, now they've validated your email so they can sell it
- culi 4y agoProbably better to just "Mark as spam" if you have Gmail. If enough people do that Google will start marking those emails as spam by default Helps everyone else too
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- SCdF 4y agoTo build on what culi said, marking as spam actually sends information out to various validators, and will increased the chance at that sender will be automatically marked as spam for everybody else, and so is absolutely worth doing (though it will also send an unsubscribe, if you're worried about that)
- MerelyMortal 4y agoDoesn't gmail offer the choice of "marking as spam" or "marking as spam and unsubscribing"? I always just choose "mark as spam".
- SCdF 4y agoI have the old UI maybe? Or the new one? I can't keep up... I just have a "Report Spam" icon, with no choice to differentiate between the two.
- sowbug 4y agoIt's an interactive prompt once you press the spam button. Whether it appears depends on whether the system identifies an unsubscribe link in the mail.
- dewey 4y agoThis was already discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32605574 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32605574
- lostlogin 4y agoWeird that the thread is flagged.
- dewey 4y agoThe "mystery" was solved and the thread buried ;)
- ColinWright 4y agoIn that case the poster originally thought that the email address used was the private one used to connect with HN. They didn't realise, and hadn't intended, that it be accessible via their public profile. If their suspicions had been correct then there would somehow have been a breach in HNs security. But they had, inadvertently, made their intended-to-be-private email available in their profile, so everyone thought it was all a misunderstanding. Hence the flagging.
- ssizn 4y agoYes, I’m sure that someone who does something like that will be stopped by your “please don’t do that”
- ColinWright 4y agoYou might be surprised. More than once I've seen someone copy something because they thought it was a clever idea, then when pointed out that it was a scammy/scummy practice, re-thought it all and did change their mind. OK, not often, but it has happened. In this case it's unlikely, but if it is someone in the HN community, perhaps they will stop and re-think.
- dangerface 4y agoMost people don't want to be an asshole but it's easy to convince oneself it's not a big deal if you only think of yourself. Once you know people have a problem with it you lose your justification, you can continue sure but now you know you'r the asshole. It's harder to knowingly be an asshole than it is to be an asshole and lie to yourself you aren't.
- zikduruqe 4y agoYou signed up with a real email address? Laughs in 1secmail.com
- LinuxBender 4y agoFrom your provided information and the current comments I would guess it is a spam campaign that targets the audience of the website it scraped. One could flag it as spam or if so inclined, create a free account on SpamCop [1] and submit the headers. Some smaller sites directly use SpamCop, UceProtect and Spamhaus and many commercial products us some of their data feeds behind the scenes to assign spam scores. It may be useful to create a throw-away email alias for their public profile and further obfuscate it in a manor that much of the HN crowd could easily decipher. e.g. echo -n 'email base64: ';echo -n 'some.hn-specific.address@some.tld' | base64 -w0;echo email base64: c29tZS5obi1zcGVjaWZpYy5hZGRyZXNzQHNvbWUudGxk [1] - https://www.spamcop.net/anonsignup.shtml https://www.spamcop.net/anonsignup.shtml
- lioeters 4y agoScraping email addresses into a "subscribers" list, sending unsolicited spam, and claiming to be associated with the official site - this is scummy behavior. Unfortunately such disrespectful behavior to online communities has become the norm, with companies like Facebook leading the onslaught of legally and ethically questionable practices to exploit and abuse the public trust. On the hierarchy of scum, they're top-level scum that demonstrates to everyone, "This is how we do business now." It's likely an "entrepreneur" trying to get traction, maybe make a little money on advertising. In their need for hustle, they crossed a line.
- jbverschoor 4y agoHustling the law or regulations is all cool, as long as you don't spam HN :)
- jacquesm 4y agoI got it too, the sender is mailscarp.com which, ironically has this blurb on their homepage: "Tired of getting spam emails from newsletters you never even signed up for? Mailscarp has you covered!" To whoever did this: you're an asshole.
- maydemir 4y agoHello everyone. I am the founder of Mailscarp. Mailscarp is an email platform that has been opened in BETA version recently and has been tested for a while with a few of our members. We apologize for the inconvenience caused by spam emails sent by a member of our Mailscarp project. The account of this member, the newsletters he owns and the subscriber emails he has uploaded to his account have been deleted immediately, and necessary measures have been taken to prevent this member from creating a newsletter again. You can be sure that we will do everything in our power to avoid such a problem again in the future. Mailscarp is already a project designed to protect you from spam emails. It was developed for this purpose, and we are very sorry to be accused for this reason. I hope you will accept our apologies for this matter and try to give Mailscarp a chance to protect you from spam in the future. Thank you!
- blitzar 4y ago> and necessary measures have been taken to prevent this member from creating a newsletter again leave the gun, take the cannoli
- wpietri 4y agoThanks for responding. Could you say who it is? Because unfortunately, a common response of corporate wrongdoers is to blame the problem on someone who has now definitely been taken care of.
- wpietri 4y agoAnd while I'm asking questions, jaquesm says, "the sender is mailscarp.com". Was it actually sent through your servers? It looks like mailscarp is only inbound, so I don't understand how one of your beta users could have spammed a bunch of people on your behalf.
- jacquesm 4y agoYes, it was, I checked the headers.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- failTide 4y agoAutomatically signing you up for a newsletter is lame, but I've emailed people here in the past asking for opinions on new projects - I don't consider that spam. I'm talking like 20-30 emails maybe - no scraping involved.
- Aeolun 4y agoUnsolicited mass emails = spam
- failTide 4y agoHow do you define mass emails though? I don't think the people who are sending out a hundred emails are really a problem as far as spam is concerned. On my other account here I have my email listed, and I expect to be contacted every now and then about random HN projects, and I am. I don't consider those spam.
- leephillips 4y agoHa, I got this this morning and deleted it before taking more than a glance. Agree, totally scummy.
- longnguyen 4y agoWow I got it too. I thought it was the HNDigest or something I subscribed long time ago.
- gist 4y ago> "You're receiving this email because you signed up on HackerNews" > That is a lie, and a tactic used by utter scum. I think 'utter scum' is an extreme reaction. And it's not necessary to make your point.
- malfist 4y agoSo you're saying if I start spamming you, you wouldn't think I'm scummy? Send me your email address and I'll sign you up for a bunch of unsolicited newletters.
- derangedHorse 4y agoThere's a difference between thinking someone has done something wrong and thinking they're 'utter scum'. And I do think there's a difference between someone sending me an unsolicited newsletter summarizing stories from a platform they know I'm on vs. random mailing lists that are wholly irrelevant to me (so signing me up 'for a bunch of unsolicited newletters' would be worse than equivalent for me). I don't think what this person did is right, but I do think the reaction to it seems overblown.
- malfist 4y agoPlease, lets be specific here. Is this an altruistic act: Signing up unwilling participants to a mailing list. Is this ever a mistake? Can you accidentally scrape email addresses off of a website and accidentally create a mailing list to spam them? Everything points to this being a malicious action. We don't need to give a spammer the benefit of the doubt.
- SantalBlush 4y agoScraping emails and sending spam is passive aggressive and wrong. It is much more disruptive and hostile than calling someone a name, and nitpicking the use of "utter scum" here is drawing attention away from the real offender, the spammer. If calling someone utter scum might get them to rethink how they are exploiting others, I will have no issue using it. OP did nothing wrong here.
- sizzle 4y agoWonder how many people are harvesting emails for general marketing spam
- notananthem 4y agoReport the mailscarp/mailscrap/etc domains to spam trackers everywhere
- tedmiston 4y agoFor anyone who ends up here looking for a legit HN newsletter, Hacker Newsletter has been around for some years, is free, sends the top posts once a week, and is pretty solid. https://hackernewsletter.com/ https://hackernewsletter.com/ Most recent edition: https://mailchi.mp/hackernewsletter/617 https://mailchi.mp/hackernewsletter/617 I'm not affiliated, just a reader, but I think it's an HN user's side project.
- duck 4y agoThanks for the mention - that would be my project! I just hit 12 years of running it.
- ColinWright 4y agoSeconded.