Tell HN: Mindie.dev is scraping emails from profiles to send spam | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Mindie.dev is scraping emails from profiles to send spam

27 pointsstackghost6 comments

Got the following from hello@mindie.dev

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Hey Stackghost —

Saw your HN comment about freelance time tracking / invoicing. TimeChat is a Telegram bot: type "1.5 acme bug fix" after work, end of month it auto-generates the PDF invoice for your client. Side-by-side vs Toggl: mindie.dev/vs/toggl.

For HN readers I'm running EARLY10: $1/mo (was $7). One-click checkout: timechat pro 2-mo trial

If it's useful, I'd love your feedback. Free tier covers solo testing if you want to start there: https://timechat.mindie.dev

Not relevant? Reply STOP and I'll never email again.

— the Mindie team mindie.dev

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I went back through my comment history and I don't believe that I have ever mentioned freelancing, time tracking, or invoicing in a comment except once when I mentioned an invoice peripherally a year ago.

Thus, mindie.dev is scraping emails from profiles and hallucinating relevant reasons to try to grease their sales funnel.

Attempting to unsubscribe via their "reply stop and I'll never email again" resulted in a bounced email.

I find this behavior to be ultra scummy and dishonest. I enjoy the communal feel from people having open emails on their profiles but it seems the taboo has been broken. I will be removing my email from my profile and suggest you do the same.

Same but different:

> Your HN comment on 'feature request tracker open source' caught my eye. Just > shipped InboxKit — $9/mo Canny alternative for indie SaaS. 8KB embed, AI dedupe, auto roadmap.

> Real story: launched yesterday, demo URL was broken for 12 hours (rebranded > from "eventium" → "mindie", forgot to > grep). Fixed now. Wrote up the postmortem here if you're curious: XXXX

> 5 early-user spots today: $3/mo first 2 months total (~$6 for 2mo), I'll > install on your site over Loom. Code > EARLY10 pre-applied: https://polar.sh/checkout/XXXX

I suspect that this is pure phishing, not an attempt to sell a product.

I’m also getting a ton of these; what’s the solution? Dedicated GitHub email account, aggressively filtered? I’m not sure this will work for me, given I’ve used GitHub SSO liberally for tools which interact with repositories (of which there are many these days).

Usually, it's because you have a public email on your profile, but if you are getting spam because of SSO, there's not much you can do other than what you just said.

Got one myself.

I keep thinking I should send these spammers gore pictures to ruin someone's day. I wish there was a service/mailing list to automate this, so I don't have to view the pictures myself.

Got one too for the same product, except the entire email is different (even the unsubscribe method!). They must be hallucinating a seperate email for everyone.

Just received one today.

AI generated products, AI emails, AI website and blog posts, and the featured story is how they tried to release AI slop without checking it, and shipped non-existing URLs. In the shape of an indiehackers founder story (which incidentally has gone full AI-slop too). No names in the about page. Just amazing.

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