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Comment by jo909 | Hacker News Reader

Yes, I want to subscribe to your newsletter!

Automatically with a browser plugin, with an address that will even accept your mails. Unfortunately no human will read them in the end, but I'm sure your metrics will be great. I might even accept a cookie so you know I'm already subscribed to your great newsletter.

Now if everybody were to do that...

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Just imagine a plugin that searches the page for emails and subscribes their email to themselves.

PS, when forced to give an email (like 5 min ago for this Wifi) just use @mailinator.com with anything prepended.

I never heard of this one; pretty neat!

Well filtering out their own domains or big anonmailers or fakes is not that hard, so it's best if the address is not distinguishable from someone who is just really bad at reading their mail.

Of course they will then begin to make automated sign ups harder, maybe with captchas or confirmation links etc. which will also discourage real users and maybe kill this concept in the long run.

That would be an great app. The user could globally set their fake name and email address -- for example I'd use my old Yahoo mail that I keep for spam storage... in the cloud(tm)!!! The app could query and update a central store of signup sequences for known sites (the names & order of the fields to supply, or even a sequence of fake keystrokes to send when the time comes, kind of like KeePass's auto-type feature).

Would admin@spamcop.net be more effective?

What browser plugin do you use?

Just saying I want to, I'm not actually doing it. I hope somebody develops such a plugin now so we can fill their pretty little mailing lists with all the millions of subscribers they want and deserve.

Shoot, I didn't pick up on that and got my hopes up!

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