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Comment by mzrnsh | Hacker News Reader

What's stopping the spammers from entering "http:// suspicious .link" as username and someone's real email as email?

Not OP, but usernames usually have restrictions to certain characters and lengths. It's pretty common to not allow : / and ., which would stop it. Space and @ usually aren't allowed either.

So "Go to superspammysite.com for horny pictures" is still an allowed username, right? Or of you skip spaces "superspammysite.com" may be enough that some spammer wants to abuse it.

I think you can't restrict usernames enough to not allow any spam. The only right way is to really just have the email and nothing else in the first confirmation mail.

Then you have "Hello superspammysite.com, welcome to our website." Not enough space for some kind of scam-text like in TFA. And considering that this has not happened in the last 27 years, it does not actually seem that worthwhile for spammers.

Good point. That still equips your competitors with all they need to ruin your reputation though:

email: some@real.address

username: F*YOU

submit!

Now your sending "Hey F*YOU!" to real people.

Yeah, you can do that. But at that point you might as well sign up to a freemailer and just send those mails like that ;)

But then it's not coming from your company's email address.

Yeah, that does not seem like an important issue.

If the entire point of the operation is to tarnish the reputation of the company then it seems like an important thing to miss out.

Yeah, that, and length restrictions.

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