
Mailinator.com: Anatomy of a Spammy Campaign - zinxq
http://mailinator.blogspot.com/2018/07/mailinatorcom-anatomy-of-spammy-campaign.html
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octosphere
I love these kind of writeups about services which are like plumbing for the
web. If it wasn't for mailinator, managing my inbox would be a chore. I use it
all the time, although there is a panoply of others to use and I suffer from
disposable inbox fatigue (just as bad as suffering from an overflowing inbox).

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nneonneo
One of the more under appreciated features of Mailinator is the fact that
they’ll take any mail sent their way, regardless of the email address domain.
This means that, if @mailinator.com is blocked for a given site, you can use
any number of aliases for it and still get through (my personal favorite is
@devnullmail.com), or you can even set up an MX record pointing at Mailinator
and effectively use a custom domain.

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logronoide
Using mail.mailinator.com as MX records are something that almost all tools
check to ban disposable email addresses. The only real thing that works for
them is to renew their domain pool as fast as they can. In our service in
[https://apility.io](https://apility.io) we check for MX records of very well
known DEPs, and also we crawl the web to try to keep an up to date list of
these domains.

~~~
snowpanda
>Anti Abuse API

Why does your company consider disposable email addresses abusive?

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logronoide
Some people use DEA to abuse of trial services of SaaS, for example. They
register again and again after the trial has expired. These users consume
resources but they never effectively become customers. Some companies ban
users using DEA, anonymous proxies, TOR, VPNs... or even Free Email addresses
(the conversion rate comparing a user registered with his or her company email
and a Free Email (gmail, hotmail, protonmail...) is much higher).

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fibers
But no one stops you from getting a domain and effectively creating infinite
email addresses to register

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Fnoord
You effectively have unlimited (not infinite) e-mail addresses with Gmail and
many other e-mail providers by using the + sign. E.g. fibers+HN@gmail.com

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chii
Except sites that mistakenly disallowed the + symbol.

Also, it's very easy to mechanically identify all such users because of the +
symbol, which, if you are trying to prevent your real email address from
revealed means it's not that useful...

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blacksmith_tb
Presumably they don't block [.] however, and since gmail ignores it, you can
always just use t.estexample@gmail, then te.stexample@gmail, etc.

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gingerlime
If spammers IPs are so widely spread out, then doesn’t it make most IP based
RBLs fairly pointless? Or worse, more likely to get false positives?

Sending legitimate email becomes increasingly frustrating, yet spammers still
to find their way to our mailbox.

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ttul
Non spammers send from a consistent pool of IPs and domains that don’t send
crap. By contrast, spammers either send high volumes of crap from a small set
of IPs and domains, or they spread a single content pattern over a wide
diversity of IPs and domains that do not have a good track record.

So long as you can keep track of literally billions of counters in real time,
you can effectively combat spammers.

Source: MailChannels CEO

~~~
kevan
For anyone that's interested, fraud detection is a pretty big use case for
graph databases[1]

[1] [https://neo4j.com/blog/fraud-prevention-neo4j-5-minute-
overv...](https://neo4j.com/blog/fraud-prevention-neo4j-5-minute-overview/)

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creativityland
Mailinator is a lifesaver. Good to see them still up and running after all
these years.

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mastef
Oh yeah, so much "good day" spam recently.

