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

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."'"

Comments

Re:He sounds like a douche...

[mwvdlee]

On the other hand, it makes it a lot harder for bulletin boards and companies to sell spamable addresses.
I used to use unique email adresses for each site I signed up on; turns out spammers got my email from some quite reputable companies.
Unless you expect to actually need to communicate through email with whatever site you're signing up to; use a fake email adress.