Mailbait- Fill your inbox with SPAM | Hacker News Reader

Mailbait- Fill your inbox with SPAM

mailbait.info

20 pointse1ven25 comments

"MailBait does not condone using other people's email address with this service. Please treat other people's email with respect and don't sign them up for spam regardless of how much you think it would be funny."

nod, nod, wink, wink?

If not, then why would you put something like this up without doing even a bog-standard email confirmation on the entered email address?

Can't tell if trolling or epically naive.

Please don't get me wrong, I didn't write this, and don't endorse it, but I find it interesting.

My suspicion echos yours, particularity based on the name (A play on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jailbait perhaps?)

That said, I think it's an interesting project, and could legitimately be quite useful in the right circumstances.

I'm a SysAdmin- I've had to train and test SPAM filters quite a few times in setting up new systems. (Zimbra/etc)

Creating a throw-away address on the new system, and having this blast it with relevant spam would be very helpful to me.

I do agree they ought to have a confirm-your-email link, though, to prevent abuse.

You can't train spam filters with 100% spam. Moreover you should train with the spam your users actually receive.

No, but you can look at what got through and figure out why it got through, then adjust settings accordingly. You might find you need to give more weight to specific blacklists or something.

mailbait is not intended to signup for spam. The email returned is solicited from legitimate services; including listservs, newsletters, and anything else users dig up to add to the system. This makes it a good fit for some tests, as inbound email is not necessarily from illegitimate sources with negative intentions.

Surely this breaks some TOSs right? Marketers are going to lose revenue by spamming people that don't want it, and they're essentially a spam service. This is pathetic.

I think a much better way to do this would be to send a confirmation email first. After the user accepts the confirmation email then it continues with the submission. This would prevent potentially evil stuff from happening.

It looks like the system sends packets to the client computer to process the website posts (signing up for email). The end user is really the person sending the sign ups.

A little side story: I worked with a person that must have made someone really mad. His corporate email account got signed up for some really bad ongoing email and he had to put some really strong filters in place to screen his incoming. It got to the point he couldn't Check his email with someone looking over his shoulder for fear of what they would see In there.

In The end, his filters were so strong not even the bosses email could make it through, and corp. policy wouldn't allow him a new address. It really was a problem.

Well.. At least we thought someone signed him up for email... Who knows.

Are you trolling?

"It looks like the system sends packets to the client computer to process the website posts (signing up for email). The end user is really the person sending the sign ups."

You understand tcp right?

Sure, TCP carries the requests, but i think k2h was referring to the javascript running clientside. tear apart the .js on the site. mailbait servers don't fill out any forms. client browsers do.

yeah - sorry, wasn't trolling. Just trying to point out that the client is not hiding behind the server. anyone logging traffic will log the traffic directly from the client machine. I could have worded that differently. sorry.

This kind of service, promoting mass single opt-in is tailor-made for abuse.

Something similar has been tried before and was shutdown as "spam support": http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...

There is no excuse for promoting this malicious garbage.

Thanks for the link - I had never heard of spamza. It is interesting that it appears to be about 4 years ago. 87 emails in 8 minutes [1] seems pretty pathetic as a spam tool.

for mailbait to keep from the same problem as spamza, it would seem using email confirmation would be the bare minimum they should setup before going public with this.

[1] http://www.zdnet.com/blog/security/spamza-opt-in-spamming-se...

This should be criminal because you can subscribe a mailbox without confirmation. I should spam my local legislator.

Now that I think about it, all public email addresses are susceptible to the exact same problems of physical mailing addresses. Anyone can send anyone anything. Unfortunately it's as if online life has the same pitfalls of real life.

Nope. Its possible to clog a e-mail box for free. It would cost lots of money to do the same kind of attack on a physical box. Lastly, the mailman would stop it. Nobody gonna stop me from spasming Daniel K. Pelosi.

> It would cost lots of money to do the same kind of attack on a physical box.

Find a couple of professional magazines. Find the "response card" in that magazine. Fill it with victim's name and real world mail address. Tick 10 boxes. Repeat this a few times. (Wear gloves when doing this and carefully destroy the magazines afterwards.) This is free for the person doing it. It's low cost for each company involved.

> the mailman would stop it.

Why would a postal worker not deliver post with a valid name and address?

You've just taken this to a whole new level. Should mailbait be extended to pair name/address with forms online? I could modify my woodburning stove and heat my house... think how much energy i'd be saving and not have to draw from a coal-fired powerplant!

It seems the post office would probably thank you. According to Time Business - it means jobs for postal workers.

http://business.time.com/2012/03/22/why-the-post-office-love...

I'd really like their list of forms so I can just write a ruby/python script to submit these in parallel via Net::HTTP or whatever. IMO that'd be way faster.

faster is only one aspect of a scalable solution. perhaps thought has been given to the potential for abuse, and trying to keep from trashing the servers on the other side.

I like it! The wording the site uses is especially entertaining!

I agree, though, that a confirmation email would be a nice thing to have.

Why did you chose not to use confirmed opt-in?

the mailbait host sends no email. ever. mailbait seeks to use the most basic of webservers with the fewest resources for hosting.

where were you guys 9 days ago? Keep the suggestions coming!

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