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."'"

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[cheeks5965]

The Bitcoin post just looks dumb; phony Bitcoins? doesn't exist; they're cryptographically signed, the whole post is ridiculous. The article, on the other hand, is very simple, if you know what Mailinator is.

Basically, it's a free webmail with no registration, no password, no security whatsoever: just send an e-mail to testaddress@mailinator.com, go to mailinator.com, and tell it you want to see the e-mails for "testaddress".

So if you go to some website and it wants your e-mail address so that it can spam you, you put in a mailinator address instead. But then the website gets wise to this and tells you that you're not allowed to put mailinator addresses in the e-mail field when you register. So Mailinator constantly creates new domains that work identically, and gives you a handful of them when you visit the site. Websites got wise to that too, and had scripts that automatically checked Mailinator and automatically blacklisted all the domains it listed.

Well, hypothetically speaking, if Mailinator's server detected that it was being accessed by a script, it could list whatever domains it wanted (google? yahoo? hotmail?) and the script would dumbly blacklist them. Result: now you can't sign up for $shitty_web_registration_account using your $real_Gmail_address, what the fuck?