Ask HN: How do you deal with persistent spam from a specific tech company? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you deal with persistent spam from a specific tech company?

2 pointsnish15006 comments

Magicbricks is a large real-estate portal based out of India. I created my account earlier this year and received a ton of marketing emails. I unsubscribed but continued to received emails.

Next, I proceeded to delete my account. The emails didn't stop.

I raised concern on Twitter. Their support staff assured me the emails would stop. They didn't.

I keep marking their emails as SPAM in Gmail but Gmail doesn't seem to learn the behaviour.

I could create a filter and automatically send their emails to spam but that feels like a personal defeat.

HN: What would you do?

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Create the filter, move on with my life. Easy to filter if the emails always come from the same domain. Do you really need to feel anything (like defeat) about this?

> I could create a filter and automatically send their emails to spam but that feels like a personal defeat.

What? Use technology to do what it is designed to do.

> What would you do?

IP block on their SMTP sender endpoint. But then I host my own email myself, so I can do such things with ease.

Yeah... that's a bit harder to do with a gmail account...

In this decade that won’t even work except against people who also host their own email. Most companies use email providers such as Google, Sendgrid, Mailgun, or send out through CRM platforms. Those services have many IP addresses and rotate them to avoid blacklisting. I haven’t seen a company of any size hosting their own outgoing email for at least ten years.

In some of the examples you provided they the email campaign providers will create a unique SNAT with a unique FCrDNS for the customer if they are big enough so they don't get in the polluted SNAT pool of smaller companies. In those cases they can still be blocked by regex or sub-domain name.

For the generic SNAT pools of the smaller customers one can at least rate limit those providers and also tag them as Possible Spam or adjust their spam score in tools like Spam-Assassin. It's not perfect but tagging and rate-limiting can help.

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