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Comment by joelthelion | Hacker News Reader

Really cool. Two remarks:

1) If lots of people start using this, spammers might learn to avoid wasting time with Mnesty's CEO. Having a few more fake companies would help.

2) The bot could probably be made a lot smarter with some natural language processing. But it seems to fill its purpose pretty well already. I think this just shows how desperate for leads spammers are.

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I would also suggest giving the spammers more intense work to do. Like a pdf form for new suppliers that they have to download, fill out, sign, scan back in, and return. Or maybe submit to a form page with a horribly difficult captcha.

IFL this. Someone please make this happen.

'[country] rules mean we need you fill out the attached pdf. Please complete and upload to [... IP logging website]'

If you want to provide the PDF on some server, I can add a link to it in one of the responses.

EDIT: Or even just the PDF, really, I can host it on the server.

Submit a form page with an impossible captcha.

Ouch. That's evil.

Make it count how many times they've attempted. Every-time clear random fields and randomise fields to make auto-filling neigh-on impossible.

Not just clear the fields but change the field names using server side scripting to keep track of the changes that way auto-fillers such as RoboForm can't be used.

edit Also re-order the form locations, placeholders so it's nearly impossible to script automation for the page!

But make the impossible captcha appears after they filled all the form.

This kept me amused for several minutes: https://www.google.com/search?q=impossible+captcha&tbm=isch

I love the randomness :) Just followed this one : https://spa.mnesty.com/conversations/rqtunkps/

> - we want to give you $10,500,000.00 !!!

> - thanks, but it's out of our budget. Can you make an effort?

I can only imagine the spammer reaction :D "Wait... wat?"

Wait, how did you follow that one? Isn't it unlisted?

What do you mean by unlisted? I forwarded it, then received a mail from smannesty containing direct link to the thread.

EDIT : oh, I also removed the private key from url param before posting it here.

EDIT 2 : typo in my initial message: by "followed", I meant "forwarded" (in french, we say "faire suivre", which translates word by word to "make follow")

Oh, okay, I thought you saw it on the front page, but the latter only shows conversations with more than two emails.

1) Yeah, there's support for multiple domains, but I have no domains right now :) If anyone wants to donate one, please open an issue!

2) Exactly, they're so desperate for leads that they will spend lots of time chasing someone who doesn't appear to make lots of sense.

Another important one: I just had to delete a conversation because my email was still in there. You should probably make the email stripping more aggressive, and make it look throughout the whole email.

Edit: just noticed I get a chance to edit the conversation. That's pretty cool, although of course it would be even better if I didn't have to :-D

I have a few domains you could borrow? I can at the least offer you 5 domains for half a year, shoot me an email if you're interested.

Will do, thank you! I need to get the process ironed out with a second domain first, then I'll contact you.

I've now read so much spam, I can't help but see it everywhere! ;-)

You too can be the proud borrower of 5 domains! Just shoot me an email at cryptarch+employee-us-bigcorp-com@gmail.com.

Besides multiple domains you could also make different companies for each domain and randomize which one shows.

Yes, each domain will have a different company name. They'll all probably have maritime shipping homepages, though.

I have inputs.space expiring on Feb 17, do you want it?

I was going to say yes, but then I realized it needs a bunch of MX/etc settings on your end, so let me streamline the process a bit more (and possibly add something to the README). Thanks for the offer!

EDIT: Opened https://gitlab.com/stavros/Spamnesty/issues/7 to track this.

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