
Ask HN: How to get lots of spam, fast? - timbowhite
I&#x27;m working on a spam control plugin and I need to test it.  Ideally, I need hundreds to thousands of emails, from different senders, delivered to my test email account.<p>Are there any tools or methods available for this? I haven&#x27;t found anything, I imagine because such a tool would be rife for abuse.
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loumf
Spam training set:

[http://untroubled.org/spam/](http://untroubled.org/spam/)

More good ones here

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4743996/publicly-
availabl...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4743996/publicly-available-
spam-filter-training-set)

~~~
cjbarber
Hopping on the top comment to provide a more serious answer than some below..

[http://www.mailbait.info/](http://www.mailbait.info/)

~~~
timbowhite
Thanks for this, best answer on the thread.

~~~
cjbarber
No problem! Glad it was what you were after

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mattkrea
Host a tor relay. I run two and put my email up as the maintainer and now I
consistently get over 200 messages a day (I've since shut down my private mail
server it was so bad).

~~~
vdaniuk
Thank you for supporting privacy efforts.

~~~
mattkrea
Thank Snowden and Appelbaum. It was because of them that I started up these
relays.

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vmp
Run a simulated OpenRelay
[https://github.com/schumann2k/SpamTrap](https://github.com/schumann2k/SpamTrap)
but instead of dropping all mail, redirect it to your target account. Might
take a few days to weeks to get started though.

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ColinWright
I have a _lot_ of spam gathered over many years. It would need washing to
remove my addresses from it, but there's a chance I could provide you with a
corpus.

I would need more details about what you're doing, and some assurances about
what you would do with the data. What do you actually need? Do you need all
the headers? It would be easier if I only needed to provide the bodies.

I would need to look at the data I have, and I might withdraw this offer if it
would be too much work. In the meantime, perhaps you could think carefully
about exactly what you need.

You can contact me via the email address in my profile. It might take a day or
two for me to reply.

------
0x0
Report a bug to Debian on [http://bugs.debian.org](http://bugs.debian.org) and
wait 20 minutes.

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karangoeluw
I did research in this area with the amazing Jeff Huang [1].

(Here's the findings: [https://medium.com/@karan/how-do-spammers-harvest-your-
e-mai...](https://medium.com/@karan/how-do-spammers-harvest-your-e-mail-
address-3d30c77a019a))

Answer to your question:
[https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/2000/0*q9f3570SPFf...](https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/2000/0*q9f3570SPFftR9cx.png)

> Notably, spammy mailing lists send the most spam. These mailing lists
> include sites that promise you free credit scores, or insurance quotes, or
> free ipads etc. These sites stink of spam, but people still continue to give
> them their email addresses.

[1] [http://jeffhuang.com/](http://jeffhuang.com/)

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austenallred
Post that your company just got funded in CrunchBase :)

But in all seriousness, look at blackhatworld.com (where the spammers gather)
and look at how they scrape and spam email addresses (search for "email
method"); there are a few ways that everyone else is copying, and you could
get your email in there.

~~~
btzll
Actually talks about email spamming are prohibited at BHW. It is mainly a SEO
forum nowadays.

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z3t4
Setup your email server to "swallow all". I did this and after a few years I
got around one million spam mails per day.

I guess that if the emails never bounce they will keep sending new stuff to
you. It's like saying "yes, yes, yes" to a sales person, they will just keep
adding more stuff :P

~~~
ChuckMcM
I would say this is a good one. You can 'seed' it by signing up a bunch of
different email addresses for various free offers or other stuff. Fill out web
surveys and always put in an email for a chance to win the imaginary amazon
gift card, also sign up to a few sites and leave the "let 3rd party offers be
sent" or what ever it is. Once you've established 3 - 10 addresses on a few
mailing lists the folks will start selling lists amongst each other and in no
time flat you'll have millions of emails a day.

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FabianBeiner
abusix provides this:
[https://spamfeedme.abusix.com/](https://spamfeedme.abusix.com/)

~~~
JoshTriplett
Something like this, or another service with a large corpus of recent spam,
seems preferable to seeking it out. The latter will not give you the kind of
spam that arrives at harvested emails.

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nickphx
Purchase recently expired domains. Spamhaus does it, domain registrars collude
with Spamhaus and threatwave/bounce.io.

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DanBC
Put the unmunged address in the from and reply-to header of a Usenet client
and make a few posts to Usenet.

Ditto some email lists.

Websearch news.admin.net-abuse.sightings

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jcoffland
You're going to want more than one email account. Ideally you would setup one
or more catch all domains where anything@domain.com dumps in to your
collection. This can be set up with Linux and Postfix. Your configuration
should not use any blacklists. Then do what others have suggested to spread
these addresses around the net.

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bdcravens
Tweet out the email perhaps?

Sign up for one of those free WalMart gift cards or the like - it's an endless
chain of "offers" you fill out. I'd hate to share any links to give them any
of HN's PR, but Googling "free walmart gift card" should get a juicy starting
point 3 links or so down the page :-)

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hellweaver666
Search for "free search engine submission" on Google. There are sites that
will take an email address as part of the signup procedure and you will get
BLITZED with spam and various junk. I used this nasty little trick to get
revenge on someone when I was but a youngling.

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philjr
TREC has a spam corpus albeit dated at this point

[http://plg.uwaterloo.ca/~gvcormac/treccorpus/](http://plg.uwaterloo.ca/~gvcormac/treccorpus/)

92k messages, 52k of which are labelled as spam messages in the 05 corpus.
Totals 300mb or so

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joshribakoff
Register domain(s) & put your email in the whois records. Once they are
indexed by google you should start to get lots of spam.

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skidoo
Post a blatantly Liberal view on any article linked at the Drudge Report, with
target email applied to whatever sign-in.

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emilioolivares
Sign up for every retail coupon/rewards program. My wife does this, gets 50+
spam emails per day.

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listic
Would a pre-assembled corpus of spam be ok for your needs?
[https://www.google.ru/search?ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&q=spam+corpus](https://www.google.ru/search?ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&q=spam+corpus)

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bizarref00l
Publish your spambox addresses as html comment in as many sites as you can,
then wait for some days and you will start receiving unsolicited messages.

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X-Istence
My mail server sees about 24,000 attempts at delivering spam to non-existent
email addresses at my domain every 24 hours...

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monadbonad
JMeter has an SMTP mode, simply point it at your smtp server and configure how
many emails you want to send.

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grapeshot
Sign up for everything on sweepsadvantage.com that doesn't require Facebook.

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eastdakota
Project Honey Pot (www.projecthoneypot.org) can provide you a feed.

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666123
speedrookie2321@hotmail.com this needs some spam as much as possible. Thanks
Stress testing something

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angersock
Sign up with GoDaddy.

Sign up with Meetup.

Sign up with Twitter.

Sign up with $tech_startup.

~~~
orthecreedence
Actually I'd put LinkedIn at the top of the list.

~~~
tdurden
LinkedIn has been the primary source of most of my spam the last year; it
deserves to be near the top of any list.

