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How To Get Websites To Ban Sign-ups From Gmail.com Accounts

Posted by Soulskill on from the battle-of-the-scripts dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Paul Tyma describes a simple, elegant, and hilarious method that Mailinator (hypothetically, of course) used to mess around with people who scraped its webpages in order to block its alternate domains. Quoting: 'Remember all that script-detecting code from the anti-abuse system? Well, what if I put that in here too, I thought. Let's "detect" when a script is hitting our weensy alternate-domain page. ... And what if after about 30 page hits from the same script (or so), stop displaying actual alternate domains and start sprinkling in some other things. Hmm... but what other things? I know — how about "gmail.com". Or, um, "hotmail.com". Or maybe, "yahoo.com."'"

1 of 175 comments (clear)

  1. He sounds like a douche... by whois · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    I've never heard of Mailinator. Now that I have I guess I'm still not interested. I have my own domain and create fake accounts to track who sells my name but I generally get more spam due to mailing list posts I make than anything else, and you can't have a one-way email for mailing list accounts (although I guess you could set them to only accept mail from the mailing list, if you're willing to not accept personal replies to things you send out)

    But this guy is full of himself. "Look at me, I setup a system to facilitate hiding your email address. Oh, people want to ban it? Lets see about that, hah!"

    A normal response would be to just give out your list, or as he claims, stop accepting mail for that website (although that's opt-out so it's automatically less good than the alternative)

    Now us evil web site owners will just have to come up with some other way to ban his bullshit.. like sharing the list publicly despite his efforts.. or.. banning his IP:

    mailinator.com. 86400 IN A 66.135.37.96
    spamherelots.com. 86400 IN A 66.135.37.96
    thisisnotmyrealemail.com. 86400 IN A 66.135.37.96

    shrug.. none of my business I suppose since I haven't heard of him, but I would be furious if I got that kind of response from an "anti-spam" company when asking them to stop spamming me.