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Comment by junon | Hacker News Reader

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junon

Welcome to public-facing application security :) Any number of reasons, potentially more than one at once:

1. Being a dick / bored / ...

2. Pen-testing you for some reason.

3. Trying to inflate your signup numbers for some reason.

4. Trying to see how many users you have (see other comment)

5. Testing their own fake email system for something

6. Trying to increase your costs

7. Demonstrating something for someone else not realizing it's production

8. Pure, unadulterated incompetence

9. Something else malicious

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10. Just trying to get rid of your "Subscribe to the newsletter" pop-up.

Assuming there is one, of course, but my experience with current newsletters is that there is a popup. Sometimes a "delayed action" one.

9. might be: get on your mailing list then when you send emails to those accounts flag them as SPAM in an effort to harm your email deliverability.

Haha sounds like fun! I need to dive into that more. Maybe for the next iteration of our website.

I tried emailing a few of these accounts from a burner email and got bounce backs on all of them.

Also just realized that since 12-15 another IP address 35.238.7.76 has submitted 4 more jibberish email accounts like uxjzylbwryxb@gmail.com.

So if they are fake accounts that bounce back, I guess that could hurt my deliverability rates with Constant Contact - not sure though. In any case I haven't been uploading them to my email contacts list so if he is trying to hurt my account it's been totally ineffective. And he'll need to increase his number of submissions by a few orders of magnitude to make a difference in the costs.

I guess my next step would have to be figuring out how to block multiple submissions from the same IP address or just reaching out to this dude and asking what's up. I need to learn more about him first since he works for someone kinda influential in my industry.

"6. Trying to increase your costs" would have been my initial guess, failing Hanlon's Razor (8.)

They’re probably just scraping e-mail newsletters for competitive intel. It’s likely a SaaS.

just 1 actor?

probably 1)...

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