Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Re:Spamnesty – A Bot to waste spammers' time by srett on Sunday December 31, 2017 @08:53AM (#16040552)

I have one domain at hand that I don't use for mail at all, so people counter >= 1. I could set any MX/SPF records you want as long as I don't have to change them every two months or so... ;-)

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