Tell HN: Redpanda is spamming emails taken from GitHub profiles

[jannesan]

On my email that is just publicly used on my Github account I have repeatedly received marketing emails from the company behind Redpanda since 2021 without ever consenting to such and without any way to opt out. Replying to the email that I wish to not receive them has not helped. The newest email from this year has a “Not interested” button, so apparently they have learned a bit. Let’s see if it actually works.

I can not imagine this shady tactics get much love from developers, rather they probably turn away people from trying your product, at least for me this is the case.

[cookiengineer]

Their marketing emails and their strategy of rotating networks and spamming services that they use were my reason to maintain my own blocklist for postfix [1]

I have zero tolerance for scraped email spam, and every single entry in that blocklist doesn't do shit when you send a complaint on their abuse@ email.

If you host your own email server, this tool/repo allows to generate ready-to-use blocklists for postfix and dovecot.

[1] https://github.com/cookiengineer/postfix-spamdb

[KomoD]

They're not the only ones either! Turing.com does it too, and they keep switching domains to avoid blacklists. They've even spammed over SMS!

[sangupta]

I have rules capturing words like "redpanda" to filter into a folder, which I monthly give a glance and delete all. This has been for many such spam where the "do not send" link/button never works.

[leros]

This isn't just one company. Lots of people scrape GitHub and your email addresses are publicly available in commits. This data is available for sale in tons of recruiting tools and people databases like People Data Labs.

[exabrial]

Can we block by DKIM key or something?

[agallego]

Hey jannesan this is untrue. We pay for ZoomInfo which gives us emails on search engines results. No one is manually filtering on your GitHub. But it should have a link to unsubscribe. Let me know if it doesn’t work and happy to remove. We use a mailing list provider which manages the unsub for us.

[KomoD → agallego]

"But it should have a link to unsubscribe"

How about don't send it in the first place? Nobody wants your unsolicited marketing emails, certainly not repeatedly for years.

[speedgoose → KomoD]

They do that because it works.

[joshxyz → agallego]

they didnt subscribe in the first place asshole.

[softwaredoug → agallego]

Your sales person texting my personal number doesn’t have an “unsubscribe”