Re:Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time
by StavrosK on Saturday December 30, 2017 @01:32PM
(#16036604)
Sure, but the goal is to waste their time a bit, you can't fool them forever anyway.
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Re:Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time
by kevin_nisbet on Saturday December 30, 2017 @01:46PM
(#16036694)
True, but also being a bit more random where it's not trivial to filter the bot on the spammers side would make it just a little bit harder to ignore.
Re:Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time
by StavrosK on Saturday December 30, 2017 @02:25PM
(#16036956)
That's true. Unfortunately, it's not trivial to add more domains, as you'd need to own them all (to add DNS records for sending and receiving). I wanted to accept donations at some point, in the form of pointed DNS records, but realized that I couldn't do that without owning the domain, as if the domain lapsed or was transferred, Spamnesty wouldn't know and it would keep sending email from that domain, to no avail.
Re:Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time
by gerdesj on Saturday December 30, 2017 @04:35PM
(#16037750)
You could request people to home sub-domains or even register full domains for you and populate MX records etc. You simply have to test the domain records before sending. You could periodically generate a TXT record, say annually, that should be updated.
I already support several projects like this.
Re:Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time
by kevin_nisbet on Saturday December 30, 2017 @03:23PM
(#16037313)
Out of curiosity, have you ever tried to track any stats about how often it reaches a spammer, whether it's interacting with the same spammer multiple times, etc?
While I think the donating of DNS records is an interesting idea, I personally wouldn't want to risk giving permission to an outside party for the domains I use, and I don't think it would be worthwhile to try and correctly maintain a domain just as a donation.
Re:Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time
by StavrosK on Saturday December 30, 2017 @03:26PM
(#16037340)
I don't have any stats, no. I assume most spammers are using random domains, so they wouldn't be very accurate anyway.
Re:Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time
by robryk on Saturday December 30, 2017 @03:11PM
(#16037232)
You could check if the MX records still point at your service, or, better yet, send a test e-mail to that domain every so often and see if it reaches your service.
Re:Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time
by StavrosK on Saturday December 30, 2017 @03:18PM
(#16037272)
Indeed, but it's added complexity and I'm not sure how many people would bother setting the DNS records I asked for. I might try it at some point, though.
Re:Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time
by Operyl on Saturday December 30, 2017 @03:47PM
(#16037502)
This is HN, I’m sure there’s plenty of us who have spare unused domains that would do it.