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Comment by gk1 | Hacker News Reader

This product lets people send up to 10,000 emails[1] at once to a cold list of contacts (ie, not opted in). Let's not kid ourselves: The use case is spamming.

The reason it's making $115k/month is because most other ESPs (Mailchimp, etc) don't allow spamming, so spammers flock to (and pay for!) products that look the other way.

To the creator: Good on you for creating a successful business. I hope you take these resources and do something positive for the world.

[1] https://www.gmass.co/blog/you-can-now-send-10000-emails-with...

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> to the creator: Good on you for creating a successful business. I hope you take these resources and do something positive for the world.

Not good on him. It's an immoral business. I don't see why the hn community would endorse this just because it makes money.

If the emails were also a tool for privacy, decentralisation or some good objective behind it, i could see the pros and cons. But here it's all pros for him, and all cons for the rest of the world.

Are you saying you've never received any benefit from an email you received that was part of a campaign? Like a discount to your favorite store? Not all uses are commercial, either. We have teachers who use it to communicate with all the parents of their students. A tennis club that emails out the week's upcoming schedule to all players. An HOA communicating with its residents.

Your use cases sound very much like opt-in (and low volume) mailing lists, not cold list of contacts without opt in.

Please post your personnal email address in the next comment, so I submit it to a few campaigns. I'm sure you'll find benefit in some of them, and some might be even legit like your home town council shedule.

ajay AT wordzen DOT com

I like how you obscured your email address from scrapers in replying to someone so that they could explicitly submit it to spam lists...

I can’t see wait for someone to put his email everywhere. “Did you mean ajay@...”

Looks like someone has a lot of free time on his hands. I've received 4 emails I didn't sign up for in the last couple minutes. https://www.dropbox.com/s/j8e0qpvnzn23opg/Screenshot%202019-...

Case in point.

Not from me. My comment was tongue in chick, I'm not going to practice what I just criticized.

Which make it even more ironical.

Oh god...

I just always love rising to these de-anonymization bluffs: dimino@gmail.com.

Let's put that good ol' spam filter to the test! I even operate under Inbox Zero, so rest assured I'll deal with every email the supposed mob is going to send me.

This is a pointless straw man argument

It's a spam tool, plain and simple. The relevancy of that spam is entirely besides the point.

Once this app becomes large enough to get on Google's radar it'll likely be shut down.

The makers of spam tools often make lots of money in the beginning (e.g., XRumer blog spam), but once they get big, adjustments are made (e.g., CAPTCHA for blog spam) and the tools become ineffective/useless.

And some people really do buy health insurance from spam phone calls.

That doesn't make it not spam. Spam provides an overall negative value to my life, even if an individual message could conceivably be useful.

Literally? I don't think so, no.

Sure, I get a lot of value from those emails. But I'd prefer the company that is sending them to be paying for the right to do so, and not circumventing the restrictions of a free email service.

I have no doubt Google will discover this and block the service, and we'll all be better off for it.

You're claiming that is the majority of your use?

If it's an HOA or small mailing list (obviously without DOI), then what is your click tracking functionality for? (I mean, the question answers itself...)

Also, shame on Indie Hackers for choosing to promote this.

Like any community, the SV startup community falls for clickbait, and given the upvotes here it certainly drove traffic both to the IH site and to the topic company's site.

Yup! You would be surprised to see how many do vote or even comment without reading an article.

That can be perfectly valid.

I always check comments before reading unless it's a topic or site I generally trust. I end up reading things I wouldn't have from title alone, and not bothering with a lot of others.

e.g. In arriving in this topic I clearly see I dislike the spam business model, the method, and have no reason at all to read the article.

Yet I just commented and upvoted you, and flagged the submission. :p

This is Hackernews, as in whites, blacks, and gray hats.

Some people here make money through cool silicon valley startups that make for great success porn but don't forget that some people here also make money doing shady or even downright illegal things.

What we have in common in this community is our technology interests, not our morals or values. If you accept this fact, you can open your mind up to some great content and conversations.

You're thinking of Crackers.

Hackers are people who create things.

http://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html

I'm not thinking of crackers.

Hackers do create things. Sometimes malicious things and sometimes things that offer no real benefit to society, but things all the same. In this definition you have to take the good with the bad.

The actual definition is in the dictionary and this is how it would be described in a legal sense as well.

hack·er

1.a person who uses computers to gain unauthorized access to data. INFORMAL an enthusiastic and skillful computer programmer or user.

I would reverse those as to which one is formal and which is informal.

What year were you born? Because it's pretty clear there must be a generation of programmers who never grew up with the whole hacker mythos of the 90s or early 2000s. Some people's only experience with the word "hacker" is a person who makes cool nice things with code.

There was a time many ages ago when the word "hacker" was reserved only for the most dangerous and reckless breed of computer programmers.

I think you might have your timelines a bit reversed.

Afaik: From the 1960s to early-80s, it meant someone who creates. From the mid-80s to mid-00s, it meant someone who breaks into systems (driven by media reporting on FBI prosecution of the first network-enabled cyber crimes). From the mid-00s to now, it seems to be turning the corner again (co-mingled with the rise of maker culture).

Words mean what the majority of people take them to mean. The fight for Hacker vs Cracker was lost well before the turn of the millennia.

What? No, words mean different things in different contexts. For example, to most people a "graph" means a thing with an x and y axis, but to computer scientists it means a thing with nodes and edges.

So yeah, in certain contexts hacker means someone who breaks into computers. In the context of this site (and MIT culture where the term came from) it means someone who draws on their creativity to make something cool.

A niche population vs the general population. When paths cross, who wins? For matters of communication, usually the general population.

Do you mean to imply that prescriptivists are completely illegitimate?

The fight happened on multiple fronts. Yes, it was lost on cnn.com, but it wasn’t lost in the comment section of HN.

I'm laughing at thinking about how "CrackerNews" might sound somewhat hilariously off color.

you crack me up ;-)

I mean no one likes spam.. it's adding negative value to anyone other than lining spammers pockets

That's not something I see celebrated on hn not sure what you mean

> some people here also make money doing shady or even downright illegal things.

No thanks.

Yeah, but philosophically, what if he takes that immorally gained money, and does 10x the good? Is that immorally gained money immoral anymore?

> Is that immorally gained money immoral anymore?

Yes.

No.

Why would you put the original comment as a question if you're being rhetorical and it's obvious people disagree with you?

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

There's a reason we don't use the research from Josef Mengele.

There is, but it's largely that his "research" was unscientific crap.

The US readily gave the equally brutal Japanese Unit 731 physicians immunity in exchange for their human experiment data on bioweapons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731#American_grant_of_imm...

Was unaware of Unit 731, thank you for the knowledge!

We use plenty of research from Nazi scientists, that's actually a horrible example, lol.

Maybe

You appear to be ignorant (meaning lacking of information, not 'stupid') of the history of social networks in the bay area:

Friendster

Hi5

Tagged

MySpace <-- LA

All about email lists and spam.

ALL of them.

All of them did shady things, founded by spammers, etc...

You're confusing a couple of issues. It's not that we're looking the other way. It's that I wanted to design a system where we don't have to look at all. GMass doesn't actually send any emails through its own servers. Emails are sent either through users' own Gmail accounts or through a third party SMTP service like SendGrid. Those actual email server operators (Gmail or SendGrid) have pretty sophisticated systems to detect spammers. THEY will shut down a user's account before I could ever even notice it. I don't have to look, because the owner of the email server will do the monitoring.

> Those actual email server operators (Gmail or SendGrid) have pretty sophisticated systems to detect spammers.

Yes, and your product helps spammers bypass those detection systems. You even explain it in the post I linked:

> GMass will automatically send 500 emails/day or 2,000 emails/day if your email campaign has more than 500 or 2,000 recipients, respectively. You can also control, however, how many go out per day with the new Spread out setting under the GMass Settings arrow. If left blank, GMass will use 500 (regular Gmail) or 2,000 (G Suite) automatically, but you can override this by setting your own value.

And...

> It's not that we're looking the other way... we don't have to look at all.

That is what the phrase means.

The text you're quoting has to do with how we distribute volume, NOT how we enable spammers. High volume campaigns does not equate to spamming. You can send a 10-email campaign that IS spam and a 10,000-email campaign that is NOT spam.

This is effectively structuring for email. Would it be immoral to sell a system that allows people to bypass money laundering restrictions by automating structuring? I don't see how this is any different.

Structuring email isn’t illegal.

It is a spam tool plain & simple. Stop defending yourself and keep counting your money instead. Congratulations on your financial success.

I hate this argument. People always resort to this type of argument when they want to divert responsibility. Have you ever heard of how the environment enables certain behaviors?

Supporting a system where people can mass-send emails = enabling spam.

How absurd will you extend this argument? "Oh, yeah, 99% of my customers are spammers, but I'm not the one making them click send! They could've just paid, twiddled their thumbs and not do anything with my product!"

If you found most of the campaigns fell in to the spam category would you shut down the business?

Maybe that's a convenient reason not to check.

> High volume campaigns does not equate to spamming

In what instances is high volume not spam when using this service? Given one legitimate use case where a customer isn't better off using a cheap MailChimp account.

I used to run ops for a mailing list with over 1 million subscribers (all double-opt-in — perhaps you should google that?).

We never had to bother avoiding any of the measures you deliberately subvert, because our mail was all legitimate.

Granted, doing a 'mail run' with that volume took about a week, but whatever.

If your (client's) recipients aren't all double-opt in, then what you're running could very easily be seen as irresponsible (and that's me being polite), no matter how much money it's making.

I don't see how any of the citations you've presented incriminate GMass in helping spammers bypass their detection systems.

And the phrase "It's not that we're looking the other way... we don't have to look at all" simply means he's delegating spam detection to the Gmail/SendGrid platforms instead.

Aka I’m going to assume no liability

Huh. Does it matter if you shoot someone with a gun labeled "Gmail" vs. one named "SendGrid"?

Depends on sendgrid's perceived customer base.

To answer your analogy with another analogy: If you're gonna get in a shootout under questionable circumstances you'd be well advised not to pick the hundred dollar hi-point as your weapon of choice.

"(Gmail or SendGrid) have pretty sophisticated systems to detect spammers"

Yes, but, the evil genius of the idea is that the email will be from a gmail domain. Emails from gmail to gmail with your own 5 year old account will have a ridiculous conversion rate. In my tests with email, if the email is from the actual gmail domain other carriers TRUST it more. Spam systems rely heavily on DNS/IPaddresses -- and this bypasses all that.

I feel for the smaller email providers. Gmail wont be able to patch this anytime soon, thus, the smaller ESPs without resources will have to change their rules to make the gmail domain less trusted.

You are correct. :)

I feel uneasy with your reaction.

Maybe reducing the max number of recipients to the hundreds would help reduce the chance for abuse while still keeping your core customer base happy? It might also reduce the risk of getting booted off the Chrome Store.

You're assuming their "core customer base" aren't spammers.

My reaction was simply validating that sending from-gmail to-gmail has high open/conversion rates, as the poster stated. However, you can only do this with a limited number of emails (500/day for Gmail or 2,000/day for G Suite). That's not to say that Google will let ANYTHING be sent between Gmail and G Suite accounts. There are lots of cases where Gmail has blocked its own users from sending to each other.

Google keeps the number pretty low (2000 daily recipients per GSuite user. Less for gmail?)

True spammers are sending spam to many orders of magnitude more recipients. They are not going to use this tool.

I don't know about other servers, but on the systems I manage gmail itself is the #1 spam source since 3 years at the very least. If you look at my previous posts, I commented on this two days ago.

There's literally _Zero_ value in DNSBL/DKIM/SPF because of this. Email sent from reputable sources is actually _more_ likely to be spam than small mail servers.

Content-based filters are the only thing that work against this sort of spam.

Following your logic, his idea wouldn't work, and he doesn't make 115k a month. But, clearly, it does [if he isn't lying] - so I am not following.

I'm not contradicting his assertions. I actually confirm them: there is now a lot of spam coming from gmail. He's clearly one of the reasons.

From your documentation:

>We recommend that an unsubscribe link be added to all mass emails containing promotional or marketing content, but the decision is up to you.

An unsubscribe link is a requirement of the CAN-SPAM Act and the GDPR. Your own docs effectively say "We advise you not to use our product to break federal and EU law, but the decision is up to you". I can't speak for anyone else, but that doesn't really accord with my sense of ethics.

https://www.gmass.co/blog/unsubscribe-link/

Technically CAN-SPAM does not require an unsubscribe link. It requires providing instructions to be removed. That could be using the text, "reply back with the word 'unsubscribe'". We put the burden of legal compliance on our users, and the tradeoff is complete control over your message content.

That's like saying a cigarette company saying "We're not the reason lung cancer exists. We just create them, and if people choose to smoke it, that's their decision!".

Which is fine, but admit you have an immoral business, and are just doing this for lots of money. Don't justify anything.

I mean they’re not wrong... it’s like the hospital refusing to help you give birth because having another child will worsen the ecological catastrophe on Earth. That’s ridiculous. Ultimately, the decision is yours, as it should be.

If there are no people left on earth, who are we preventing the catastrophe for?

It'd be more like a gas station saying that, not the cigarette company saying that.

"I Hit $115k/Month with a Gmail Span Cannon" might not have produced the levels of engagement he was looking for.

Just FYI, I didn't come up with the title for the interview. The editors at IH did.

Does that comment means you would you be ok with the "spam canon" one too?

Reminds me of a HN story awhile back from a guy who built a business with eye-popping revenue. The article was cagey about what the product was - some kind of imported good.

Turns out it was counterfeit watches. Ugh.

I guess this product is targetted to very small shops. It’s pretty usual to have the optin in a pc/pos without any email capability.

Even YCcompanies sell your info for marketing.

https://www.reddit.com/r/stocks/comments/ao8gav/carta_spread...

This will be a pretty short-lived business once the spam traps detect what's happening.

Not only is it a spam tool, but this post is an advertisement for his spam tool.

I'm glad it wasn't just me being sick and my mind muddled that was making me raise an eyebrow as I was reading his description.

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