When I worked for an online dating app, at one point we had the ridiculous idea to try to take a popular LinkedIn feature and convert it to a dating app feature in order to capitalize off of the success LinkedIn had with it.

The feature was LinkedIn endorsements. The idea was to allow the dating app users to get endorsements from people in their contacts lists on certain traits/features from a defined list (ex. Funny, smart, etc.). It wasn’t a terrible idea on the surface, but the way we planned to execute on it was insane and everyone knew it was going to fail. To avoid any controversy all of the endorsable terms were watered down to the point where no one would ever find using them/asking their friends for endorsements to be any fun. And the worst part was how we planned to get people to ask their friends for endorsements - management wanted us to build a contact list importer and just spam email contacts with “please endorse me” emails. The whole thing was ridiculous.

No one, including myself, wanted to build the feature/spam tool but management really wanted it so we had to build it. Like expected, it failed very quickly when it was clear no one cared about getting their real life friends to endorse them on some dating app, and the spam contacts took was ineffective and... spammy.

When you sign up for anything online, put the websites name as your middle name. That way when you receive spam/advert emails, you will know who sold your info.

So this happened today.

Client: hey I sent this ticket, what's the status/have you located the issue?
Me: well, it says it quite obviously in the error message...? (i actually said that, toned down afterwards a little)
Client: where's the error message then?
Me: 5th line....? It's literally there in plain english?
Client: ok so what does it mean?
Me:..............? "marked as spam by the receiving server"?!
Client: yeah ok but what does that mean?

😐

Thing to keep in mind: they're a web dev/email solutions company.

😐😩

Who am I to refuse such a flattering offer?

Client: so how could we test this 😬
Me: you know what, send me an email at linuxxx@companyname.com and I can look if I can properly reply! Keep in mind though that this is for one time only, no further questions through that email address!
Client: Yes of course! *sends email*
Me: *tests* - *works fine* - *messages client back through the ticket system*
Client: *proceeds to send two follow up questions to my fucking work email address*

Me: *selects emails* - *marks emails as spam and deletes them*

Fucking seriously?! Cunt.

Fuck Microsoft.

No, not in any relation to windows this time.

Dear Microsoft, why on earth did you put us on your spam blacklist? There haven't been any spam attacks from our side, our servers have nearly the highest 'reputation' that email servers can get, we comply to all security standards and yet you're blacklisting us.

If for some reason you think something is wrong at our side anyways, we've tried to contact you and we either get ignored or get a very late response saying that we'll get delisted again within a day/week or whatsoever.

Microsoft, please go fuck yourself.

Last week, I notified a customer about that their webbserver spewed out several thousands of spam emails every hour, and they have to fix it ASAP.
(I also inform them for the 50th times for the last 2 years that they really need to update their websites so we can update from Debian 5).

The owner of the company forward this to their developers.

Today, I got the answer from them denying everything and blaming our "negligence" and they also dared to question all our technical expertise. shots fired

Spend some hours, finding shit on their websites, dug out logs, read documentation and old conversation and compiled that into a huge email that was designed to put them 10 meters under ground.

mfw I pressed send

Sites that make you LOG IN to unsubscribe from newsletters YOU SPECIFICALLY DID NOT SUBSCRIBE TO.

-Registers on a site to use the product
-Opens email

"Our weekly news digest"
"Our daily news digest"
"You haven't used our products for 15 minutes. We miss you"
"Would you recommend our products to a friend"
"If you like this, you'll LOVE this"
"Here's a promo code for something you don't need"
"You've unsubscribed. Was it really you?"
"You've unsubscribed. Was it really you?"
"You've unsubscribed. Was it really you?"
"You've unsubscribed. Was it really you?"

FUCK OFF YOU ANNOYING CUNTS

Email: Hi [...], If you can't see this message check in the Spam folder!

Me: ah, ok.

!(short rant)

Look I understand online privacy is a concern and we should really be very much aware about what data we are giving to whom. But when does it turn from being aware to just being paranoid and a maniac about it.? I mean okay, I know facebook has access to your data including your whatsapp chat (presumably), google listens to your conversations and snoops on your mail and shit, amazon advertises that you must have their spy system (read alexa) install in your homes and numerous other cases. But in the end it really boils down to "everyone wants your data but who do you trust your data with?"

For me, facebook and the so-called social media sites are a strict no-no but I use whatsapp as my primary chating application. I like to use google for my searches because yaa it gives me more accurate search results as compared to ddg because it has my search history. I use gmail as my primary as well as work email because it is convinient and an adv here and there doesnt bother me. Their spam filters, the easy accessibility options, the storage they offer everything is much more convinient for me. I use linux for my work related stuff (obviously) but I play my games on windows. Alexa and such type of products are again a big no-no for me but I regularly shop from amazon and unless I am searching for some weird ass shit (which if you want to, do it in some incognito mode) I am fine with coming across some advs about things I searched for. Sometimes it reminds me of things I need to buy which I might have put off and later on forgot. I have an amazon prime account because prime video has some good shows in there. My primary web browser is chrome because I simply love its developer tools and I now have gotten used to it. So unless chrome is very much hogging on my ram, in which case I switch over to firefox for some of my tabs, I am okay with using chrome. I have a motorola phone with stock android which means all google apps pre-installed. I use hangouts, google keep, google map(cannot live without it now), heck even google photos, but I also deny certain accesses to apps which I find fishy like if you are a game, you should not have access to my gps. I live in India where we have aadhar cards(like the social securtiy number in the USA) where the government has our fingerprints and all our data because every damn thing now needs to be linked with your aadhar otherwise your service will be terminated. Like your mobile number, your investment policies, your income tax, heck even your marraige certificates need to be linked with your aadhar card. Here, I dont have any option but to give in because somehow "its in the interest of the nation". Not surprisingly, this thing recently came to light where you can get your hands on anyone's aadhar details including their fingerprints for just ₹50($1). Fuck that shit.

tl;dr
There are and should be always exceptions when it comes to privacy because when you give the other person your data, it sometimes makes your life much easier. On the other hand, people/services asking for your data with the sole purpose of infilterating into your private life and not providing any usefulness should just be boycotted. It all boils down to till what extent you wish to share your data(ranging from literally installing a spying device in your house to them knowing that I want to understand how spring security works) and how much do you trust the service with your data. Example being, I just shared most of my private data in this rant with a group of unknown people and I am okay with it, because I know I can trust dev rant with my posts(unlike facebook).

You is not gonna beliebers what just happened lol

So a couple weeks ago I earned a stress ball (300+ ++'s) I sent an email about it but never got a reply, so I decided to just forget about it. But then I just ranted (lastnight) about how its so hard to get a stressball. So I basically just said "fuck it i'll buy one". Then some dude comes along and is like "omg not until he shows us the bought one" so I'm like CHALLENGE ACCEPTED and buy one...

Then I get an email confirmation from devrant store confirming my order for the bought stressball. And I notive that my spam folder has unread messages in it. i look inside the spam folder and what do I see?...

I see dfox replying to my free stressball request weeks ago lol. So yay, now I gets the 3 balls (or two - depending) lol omg, so many balls.

I hate it when I click on the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email (which is in fact hidden by making the text color slightly darker/lighter than the background of the email ) and it takes me to some freaking website where I have to like summon a demon and sacrifice a virgin to unsubscribe from their emailing list and they send me another email saying I have successfully unsubscribe and if I want to resubscribe again and with you guest it another unsubscribe button at the end of that email .....

Had an interesting time these past few days. Had a customer who, when I left for vacay, was complaining that he couldn't get access to our private package registry. Get back, this issue is still active.

We'd granted access to his github enterprise, and for some reason he wasn't getting the activation email. We spent about 22 hours of customer support time on his failing to help himself before he finally escalated to the standard 40 person IT enterprise tantrum/come to jesus meeting.

Long story short, he had somehow ignored repeated attempts (35 email replies to the ticket chain, 4 phone calls) to get him to check his spam folder. In which, as it was revealed to all the hollywood squares in attendance, there were no less than 35 activation emails from github granting him access. Of course, none of this was his fault. And while screensharing his big brain to god and everyone he decides the problem is now actually Microsoft because their office 365 spam email filtered his emails incorrectly. We of course agreed with his big brain, smoothed over his bruised ego and went about our day.

I mean, fair enough, it's kind of dumb that Microsoft ever spam lists github, but still. I was just a fly on the wall, and he burned all his paid support tickets on the issue, so hopefully we won't be dealing with him again this year.

Also, this is an edge case with our new product line, most of our customers are painless.

> In office for first time in awhile
> Run into group of 4 people I don’t recognize in far cubicle corning laughing in hushed voices eating of an impressive spread of food
> See me and immediately look at each other with panicked expressions
> Confused, I put my hands up to indicate I come in peace
> They relax a little and say they thought I was from HR since they didn’t recognize me
> Ask why HR seeing them would be such a big deal
> They say their potluck is not “sanctioned”
> …?

So apparently HR just could resist ruining one of the only good things about coming into the office and one of the coolest things about the company’s culture. At least once a month there would be a giant potluck where everyone would bring some home cooked dish and share it. I can’t tell you how amazing these are in Canada, 50+ plates of authentic food from all over the world.

Unfortunately HR didn’t agree as 1. They didn’t cook so felt bad taking food. 2. Nobody asked them permission to put on these events they just happened organically. 3. Some people were bringing in food that they felt was culturally inappropriate (ie. caucasian guy bringing in homemade sushi).

HR recently banned all “unsanctioned” potlucks and all future potlucks needed to be approved through them with the following stipulations. 1. You could participate without bringing something by donating to HR $10 2. If you brought something you still had to give HR $10. 3. Things you brought in had to be approved by HR

Naturally the first and only potluck under these rules only 4 people brought something in as many couldn’t get their dishes approved because HR didn’t like what they were planning to bring (started out as being because culture and turned into HR just being picky), most just brought $10 so there wasn’t enough food to go around and so after HR took a giant group photo to post on the company’s social media accounts to show off how good the company’s culture is most everyone had to go out for lunch. HR sent out an email later that day exclaiming what a huge success for charity and the company brand the potluck was and they can’t wait for the next one. (I have the HR communications email marked as spam so I never saw the email). Nobody ever organized a sanctioned potluck after that.

However people still missed cooking and sharing their favourite recipes with one another so potlucks still occur but they are now very small, secret, invite-only, hush-hush affairs.

…What in the ever loving fuck

I think I've finally realized something:
my boss does not actually listen to me.

Quite often during out weekly conference calls, he asks me questions about things I had just covered. I always assumed he couldn't hear because a) i'm rather quiet, and b) freeconferencecall.com bloody sucks.

But it happens for written things, too. I type an update on something in Slack, and an hour later he asks me for an update on it. I always assumed (likely correctly) that he has nearly zero reading comprehension. He writes like a 5th grader and only remembers a few nouns and one verb from anything he reads. But I swear he actively skips reading anything I write.

Now, however, I have frigign' proof that he ignores me. We have both been trying to get ahold of {Clover contractor} via email for months. We have gotten three replies, but twice scheduling prevented setting up a meeting, and once I simply missed the email amongst the flood of log spam I haven't been allowed to address.

I have asked the boss multiple times for the guy's phone number -- in emails, in Slack, and in front of everyone during our weekly conference calls -- and he has totally ignored me every. single. time.

Here's a transcript of my seventh(!) attempt:

Boss [2:13 PM]
Have you and {Clover contractor} met yet? If not make it happen. Stop letting it not happen. GIve specific dates and times. {Clover contractor} let's talk Tuesday 2pm or Wednesday 4pm which works better for you.

Root [2:14 PM]
For the seventh and last time, give me his phone number.
Getting ahold of him via email has not worked.

Boss [2:14 PM]
I am sendning one more, from that I want you to make the meeting happen asap.

Root [2:14 PM]
if i call him, setting up a meeting will be _easy_
Give me his phone number and I will handle this.

It is now 3:00pm and I haven't gotten a response.

Either he doesn't want it to happen, wants me to fail for some reason, or he's totally fucking oblivious. Yet ofc it's me who earns all of the blame when this meeting doesn't happen, and I'm likely to get yelled at in front of everyone, fucking again.

I'm really beginning to hate this guy.

I can't wait to walk out on him and watch the company come crashing down in my absence. It'll be sad to watch, but bloody hell does he deserve it for his arrogant incompetence.

*registers for an account on RaidForums*
> Sorry mate, we only accept the following email carriers: gmail.*, googlemail.*, hotmail.*, hotmail.*.*, yahoo.*, yahoo.*.*, ymail.*, live.*.*, live.*, outlook.*, outlook.*.*, protonmail.*, riseup.net, aol.com, gmx.de, raid.lol, msn.com, cox.net, mail.ru, att.net, bellsouth.net, laposte.net, rambler.ru, sky.com, mail.com, pm.me, shaw.ca, charter.ca, facebook.com, terra.com.br, libero.it, web.de, free.fr, orange.fr, wanadoo.fr, rediffmail.com, comcast.net, yandex.ru, uol.com.br, bol.com.br, sfr.fr, verizon.net

Now what if some dickhead somewhere wants to use his own domain to be able to reroute any spam from some forum dickheads to /dev/null, hmm? YOU FUCKING WANKERS, LET ME FUCKING USE MY OWN DOMAIN ALREADY YOU TWATS!!!

My private Email Account got hacked when I was in school, and they sent out a mail with something along the lines of "hey, you should really use this product to lose weight, it is great" to all of my contacts. Many of them ignored it, some of them called me to inform me about the issue (the worst part was, long after I used 2fa and changed passwords regularly, they still had my name and contact list, so they just made email adresses that looked like mine and continued to send out spam to my contacts). Anyway, one teacher of mine didn't know that this was a scam and was insulted because I regularly sent emails about her losing weight. And as if the whole situaion, which I couldn't do anything about, wasn't bad enough, my parents and I had do have a 1h conversation (which ended up in me explaining how those hacks work, and luckily she understood, but still). Never again. I prefer those fake ms support guys that call me over this every day.

This should be illegal.

FUCK CORPORATE EMAIL SPAM

AND I DON'T MEAN SOME SOME EXTERNAL SCAM/AD/PISHING EMAILS

I MEAN THE SHIT MY OWN COMPANY SENDS TO ME

LIKE:

"tHE WelLbeIng Course : SiGN In now!!!!!"

"#MoRnIngcOfFEE witH SOME cORporatE TWAt"

"Give togetHER : LETs circLE JerK OurSeLveS in SOMe fuCKiNg oNLiNe mEetInG !!!!!!!"

I DON'T FUCKING CARE !

I GET DOZENS (IF NOT FUCKING HUNDREDS) OF SUCH SHIT EMAILS EVERY DAY.

IF I GO ON VACATION, I HAVE TO SPEND HOURS TO SORT SHIT OUT

I HAVE HAD TO SET UP ELABORATE OUTLOOK RULES TO GET IT SORTED AUTOMATICALLY INTO SOME MANAGEABLE FOLDERS (AND SPEND SOME OF MY LIMITED TIME, HERE ON EARTH, TO DO SO)

AND GUESS WHAT

THANKS TO THOSE STUPID RULES I MISSED, ONE FUCKING IMPORTANT EMAIL

CAN YOU JUST STOP FUCKING SPAMMING ME ?!!!

FOR CHRIST SAKE AND I DON'T CARE ABOUT THIS STUPID CORPORATE BULLSHIT

STOP SENDING IT TO ME

Seems legit

I absolutely love the email protocols.

IMAP:
x1 LOGIN user@domain password
x2 LIST "" "*"
x3 SELECT Inbox
x4 LOGOUT

Because a state machine is clearly too hard to implement in server software, clients must instead do the state machine thing and therefore it must be in the IMAP protocol.

SMTP:
I should be careful with this one since there's already more than enough spam on the interwebs, and it's a good thing that the "developers" of these email bombers don't know jack shit about the protocol. But suffice it to say that much like on a real letter, you have an envelope and a letter inside. You know these envelopes with a transparent window so you can print the address information on the letter? Or the "regular" envelopes where you write it on the envelope itself?
Yeah not with SMTP. Both your envelope and your letter have them, and they can be different. That's why you can have an email in your inbox that seemingly came from yourself. The mail server only checks for the envelope headers, and as long as everything checks out domain-wise and such, it will be accepted. Then the mail client checks the headers in the letter itself, the data field as far as the mail server is concerned (and it doesn't look at it). Can be something else, can be nothing at all. Emails can even be sent in the future or the past.

Postfix' main.cf:
You have this property "mynetworks" in /etc/postfix/main.cf where you'd imagine you put your own networks in, right? I dunno, to let Postfix discover what your networks are.. like it says on the tin? Haha, nope. This is a property that defines which networks are allowed no authentication at all to the mail server, and that is exactly what makes an open relay an open relay. If any one of the addresses in your networks (such as a gateway, every network has one) is also where your SMTP traffic flows into the mail server from, congrats the whole internet can now send through your mail server without authentication. And all because it was part of "your networks".

Yeah when it comes to naming things, the protocol designers sure have room for improvement... And fuck email.

Oh, bonus one - STARTTLS:
So SMTP has this thing called STARTTLS where you can.. unlike mynetworks, actually starts a TLS connection like it says on the tin. The problem is that almost every mail server uses self-signed certificates so they're basically meaningless. You don't have a chain of trust. Also not everyone supports it *cough* government *cough*, so if you want to send email to those servers, your TLS policy must be opportunistic, not enforced. And as an icing on the cake, if anything is wrong with the TLS connection (such as an MITM attack), the protocol will actively downgrade to plain. I dunno.. isn't that exactly what the MITM attacker wants? Yeah, great design right there. Are the designers of the email protocols fucking retarded?

Fucking precious fragile snowflake dick heads.
Some bot beats a contact form captcha and an email with "offensive" content gets into a mailbox, and they're immediately shouting to HR that we're not protecting them from it.

Bitch, we'll NEVER be able to shield your super special self from all the big nasty bad men on the net - GET THICKER SKIN YOU THUNDERCUNT

One more fucking whine like that, and I'm gonna get far more offensive than your fucking inbox

The nightmare continues.

Currently dealing with a code review from a “principal” dev (one step above senior), who is unironically called a “legendary dev” by some coworkers. It’s painfully obvious he didn’t read the code, and just started complaining and nitpicking.

It’s full of requests to do things that make absolutely no sense, and would make the code an unmaintainable mess.
• Ex: moving the logic and data collection from the module’s many callers into the module instead of just passing in the data.
• Ex: hiding api endpoint declarations by placing them in the module itself, and using magic instance variables to pass data to it. Basically: using global functions and variables instead of explicit declarations and calls.
• Ex: moving the logic to determine which api endpoint to use, for all callers, into the view.

More comments about methods being “too complex” (barely holds water) right next to comments saying “why are these separate? merge them together!”

Incredulously asking how many times I’m checking permissions and how ridiculous it all is. (The answer? Twice.)

Conflating my “permissions” param and method names with a supposedly forthcoming permissions system overhaul, and saying I shouldn’t use permissions because my code will all have to get rewritten. Even if that were true, and it’s likely not, the ticket still needs to use the current permissions. I can’t just ignore them because they might be rewritten someday.

Requests to revert some code cleanup because the reviewer thought the previous heavily-nested and uncommented versions (with code duplication) were easier to read. Unsurprisingly, he wrote them.

On the same ticket, my boss wants me to remove all styling and clientside validation, debouncing, and error messages from a form. Says “success” and “connection failed” messages are good enough. The form in question sends SMS and email using arbitrary user input for addresses. He also says it shouldn’t be denounced on the server, and doesn’t want me to bother checking permissions. Hello, spam!

Related: the legendary dev reviewer says he can’t think of a reason why we would want to disable the feature for consumers, so I should remove the consumer feature flag.

You can’t make this stuff up.

When your client thinks they will get a quicker response by emailing you the same email to multiple addresses, they don't know I have a filter that sends them straight to the shithead folder skipping the inbox! Bye bye problem.

DevOps required skillset:

* Frontend engineering
* Backend services
* Database administrator
* Security consultant
* Project management
* 3rd party contract negotiator
* Build system monitor
* Build system hostage negotiator
* Paging, alerting, monitoring
* Search server admin
* Old search server admin
* Old-old-new search server admin
* Redis, ElasticSearch, MySQL, PostGres, owner
* Agile coach
* No you shouldn't do that coach
* Oh, you did that anyway coach
* DNS: (Optional) It'll replicate when it wants, and how it wants to to anyway
* Multi-Cloud deployment strategist
* Must be able to translate Klingon to YAML, and YAML to MySQL
* Cost analyzer, reducer, and justifier
* Complex documentation generation in markdown that we should have done years ago anyway
* Marketing's email went to spam analyzer
* Wordpress is broke fixer
* Where the fuck does Wordpress run anyway?
* Ability to fix MySql running Wordpress on marketing's dusty laptop

Paranoid Developers - It's a long one
Backstory: I was a freelance web developer when I managed to land a place on a cyber security program with who I consider to be the world leaders in the field (details deliberately withheld; who's paranoid now?). Other than the basic security practices of web dev, my experience with Cyber was limited to the OU introduction course, so I was wholly unprepared for the level of, occasionally hysterical, paranoia that my fellow cohort seemed to perpetually live in. The following is a collection of stories from several of these people, because if I only wrote about one they would accuse me of providing too much data allowing an attacker to aggregate and steal their identity. They do use devrant so if you're reading this, know that I love you and that something is wrong with you.

That time when...

He wrote a social media network with end-to-end encryption before it was cool.

He wrote custom 64kb encryption for his academic HDD.

He removed the 3 HDD from his desktop and stored them in a safe, whenever he left the house.

He set up a pfsense virtualbox with a firewall policy to block the port the student monitoring software used (effectively rendering it useless and definitely in breach of the IT policy).

He used only hashes of passwords as passwords (which isn't actually good).

He kept a drill on the desk ready to destroy his HDD at a moments notice.

He started developing a device to drill through his HDD when he pushed a button. May or may not have finished it.

He set up a new email account for each individual online service.

He hosted a website from his own home server so he didn't have to host the files elsewhere (which is just awful for home network security).

He unplugged the home router and began scanning his devices and manually searching through the process list when his music stopped playing on the laptop several times (turns out he had a wobbly spacebar and the shaking washing machine provided enough jittering for a button press).

He brought his own privacy screen to work (remember, this is a security place, with like background checks and all sorts).

He gave his C programming coursework (a simple messaging program) 2048 bit encryption, which was not required.

He wrote a custom encryption for his other C programming coursework as well as writing out the enigma encryption because there was no library, again not required.

He bought a burner phone to visit the capital city.

He bought a burner phone whenever he left his hometown come to think of it.

He bought a smartphone online, wiped it and installed new firmware (it was Chinese; I'm not saying anything about the Chinese, you're the one thinking it).

He bought a smartphone and installed Kali Linux NetHunter so he could test WiFi networks he connected to before using them on his personal device.

(You might be noticing it's all he's. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't).

He ate a sim card.

He brought a balaclava to pentesting training (it was pretty meme).

He printed out his source code as a manual read-only method.

He made a rule on his academic email to block incoming mail from the academic body (to be fair this is a good spam policy).

He withdraws money from a different cashpoint everytime to avoid patterns in his behaviour (the irony).

He reported someone for hacking the centre's network when they built their own website for practice using XAMMP.

I'm going to stop there. I could tell you so many more stories about these guys, some about them being paranoid and some about the stupid antics Cyber Security and Information Assurance students get up to. Well done for making it this far. Hope you enjoyed it.

Buy a domain. Watch 100s of spam email, sms and dodgy phone calls come in.

It is legit and approved 👍🤭

So, sometime ago, Elon musk proposed a website that ranks news sources.

How about a website where we rate recruiters and black list those inhuman ones like the guy who sent an email saying you're legally not allowed to work for anyone else and 750 month pay for 40 hours a week.

A public spam filter, like ads or spam emails, but from disrespectful recruiters

That way recruiters feel more scared and improve their behaviors against programmers from all levels and everyone can have better experience during job search.

(I mean I'm sure these recruiters got some blacklist of their own, right?)

Since I've got back up plan now, FUCK programming!!

Client:
"Ok,. so your saying that its gonna take you 63 hrs to create a simplified CRM with basic functionality and auto fill docs or automated work flow docs as an added feature?"

My response (after already under-quoting and planning on cutting some corners because he has a smaller budget than normally necessary):
"It sounds simpler than it is. There are a lot of things I need to take into account that you wouldn't even think about.

For instance:

Making sure your emails don't go to the client's spam folder. This requires the sending domain to be verified via DNS settings. I have to ensure your email content passes a spam test (link to text ratio needs to be good). I assumed you'd want an email that has your logo and looks good. This means testing the design in Outlook to make sure it's not broken.

What if the email doesn't send due to an invalid email address, or bounces back? You'll need to be notified.

What if the client list for the week contains duplicates? You need them merged or ignored.

Generating a PDF from HTML can be tricky because the conversion isn't apples to apples so there are things I need to adjust to make them as close as possible.

Making a site completely mobile friendly (the tier 3 option) can be very time consuming as well. It's not about whether or not it fits on a mobile phone, it's about whether or not it's intuitive and useful. You're essentially getting a mobile app without paying for separate development of an app.

If I took everything into consideration and built this to be 100% bullet proof, it would cost tens of thousands.

I'm doing my best to leverage your needs with the probability of running into an issue. I'm not going waste my time/your money on something that will likely never happen."

The state of the web in 2020:
discussion sites as a medium are dying. chalk that up to censorship.

reddit is an echochamber. twitter is mostly a marketing platform disguised as (anti)social media. instagram is a self promotion/wannabe eceleb site, and youtube is the new hollywood..quickly becoming irrelevant.

facebook is where I (dont) go to (totally not) ignore all the people important to me.

and email is where I go to send letters bordering on hatespeech to my various local and federal "representatives", in between borderline cyberbullying people stupid enough not to automate their spam marketing in 2020. or talking to left/right self-help grifters about the state of society.

in the grim dark future of 2020, the last bastion of intelligent conversation, free speech, and civility, the one shining icon of hope in a dark world..
is the comment section of pornhub videos where a women got stuck under a bed for the 50,000th time. And all I can think is "wow I never knew how easy it was to get trapped under a bed. They should look into fixing this safety hazard."

newsmedia has jumped so many sharks, the fonz now spins in his grave so fast we could hook him up to a generator. meanwhile people hide in their homes for a disease so deadly you have to be tested to know if you even have it.

while ever more car commercials
are released, set to somber but hopeful piano music to the tune of "in this time of social distancing its important to stay close even when we're apart."

Im beginning to think media has become a poison on society, both television and the internet, and like an ersatz cargo cultist worshipping the great-charles- manson-in-the-sky we should all take a page from the unabomber and smash our televisions with hammers before going outside and sawing down the telephone polls.

I jest of course. But there is no denying the inherent appeal of moving from the unsettling uncertainty of complex societies, driven by expertly manipulated fear cycles, to the beatitude-esque simplicty of pastoral protestant style living, sans witch burning and shoe buckles.

And against the reckoning of utopians who are still fresh from the womb as it were, wet behind the ears and smelling of their mother's pussy, I reject the notion that "up" is a synonym for "forward."
Were it the case, every drinking binge, followed by throwing up, would bring us, with each vomitting, one step closer to heaven. Rather the state of affairs is what it is, and what it is, like most of nature, is a cruel master and a harsh teacher. And while we may binge on digital delusions of grandeur and a greater society, rest easy in the nihilistic and sobering thought that we are little more than 200,000 year old cave men wielding magic bricks, and atomic bombs.

..where water flows more readily from metal tubes in our houses than it does from the nile. where food comes to our door at little more than our beck and call.
where we may bath, and sleep, and *shit*, cleanly, comfortably, and safely, wrapped in the (failing) bubble of delusion we all tenaciously grasp collectively, the thing we call "civilization".

an empire of needful things, wanton and fragile.

if we have not gone mad from boredom, I have no doubt we one day will.

it becomes more and more obvious to me every day, had war never existed, it would have been necessary for man to invent it just to have something to do, that didnt include farming, fucking, or building.

And so enters "political idealogy."

How would we ever have enemies if we were allowed to speak our piece instead of being given the means (and reflex dogwhistle training) to silence and destroy one another?

give a man a gun, he'll rob a bank. give a man a bank, he'll rob the world.
give him a media empire or a tech platform, and he'll lie about the theft and convince one half of millions of lemmings to hate all the other lemmings.

Best part about the covid19 manufactured crisis?
Liquor stores deliver. Worst part about liquor stores delivering? Needing to use their shoddy websites.

I've been using a particular store (Total Wines) since they're cheaper than the rest and have better selection; it's quite literally a large warehouse made to look like a store.

Their website tries really hard to look professional, too, but it's just not. It took me two days to order, and not just from lack of time -- though from working 14 hour days, that's a factor.

Signing up was difficult. Your username is an email address, but you can't use comments because the server 500s, making the ajax call produce a wonderfully ambiguous error message. It also fades the page out like it's waiting on something, but that fade is on top of the error modal too. Similar error with the password field, though I don't remember how I triggered it.

Signing up also requires agreeing to subscribe to their newsletter. it's technically an opt-in, but not opting-in doesn't allow you to proceed. Same with opting-in to receiving a text notification when your order is ready for pickup -- you also opt-in to reciving SMS spam.

Another issue: After signing up, you start to navigate through the paginated product list. Every page change scrolls you to the exact middle of the next page. Not deliberatly; the UI loads first, and the browser gets as close as it can to your previous position -- which was below that as the pagination is at the bottom -- and then the products populate after. But regardless of why, there is no worse place to start because now you must scroll in both directions to view the products. If it stayed at the very bottom, it would at least mean you only need to scroll upwards to look at everything on the page. Minor, but increasingly irritating.

Also, they have like 198 pages of spirits alone because each size is unique entry. A 50ml, 350ml, 500ml, 750ml, 1000ml, and 1750ml bottle of e.g. Tito's vodka isn't one product, it's six. and they're sorted seemingly randomly. I think it's by available stock, looking back.

If you fancy a product, you can click on it for a detail page. Said detail page lists the various sizes in a dropdown, but they're not sorted correctly either, and changing sizes triggers a page reload, which leads to another problem:

if you navigate to more than a few pages within a 10 or so second window, the site accuses you of using browser automation. No captcha here, just a "click me for five seconds" button. However, it (usually) also triggers the check on every other tab you have open after its next nagivation.

That product page also randomly doesn't work. I haven't narrowed it down, but it will randomly decide to start failing, and won't stop failing for hours. It renders the page just fine, then immediately replaces it with a blank page. When it's failing, the only way to interact with the page is a perfectly-timed [esc], which can (and usually does) break all other page functionality, too. Absolutely great when you need to re-add everything from a stale copy of your signed-out cart living in another tab. More on that later. And don't forget to slow down to bypass the "browser automation" check, too!

Oh, and if you're using container tabs, make sure to open new tabs in the SAME container, as any request from the same IP without the login cookie will usually trigger that "browser automation" response, too.

The site also randomly signs you out, but allows you to continue amassing your cart. You'd think this is a good thing until you choose to sign in again... which empties your cart. It's like they don't want to make a sale at all.

The site also randomly forgets your name, replacing it with "null." My screen currently says "Hello, null". Hello, cruft!

It took me two days to order.
Mostly from lack of time, as i've been pulling 14 hour shifts lately trying to get everything done. but the sheer number of bugs certainly wasted most of what little time i had left. Now I definitely need a drink.

But maybe putting up with all of this is worthwhile because of their loyalty program? Apparently if you spend $500, you can take $5 off your next purchase! Yay! 1%! And your points expire! There are three levels; maybe it gets better. Level zero is for everyone; $0 requirement. There are also levels at $500 and $2500. That last one is seriously 5x more than the first paid level. and what does it earn you? A 'free' magazine subscription, 'free' classes (they're usually like $20-$50 iirc), and a 'free' grab bag (a $2.99 value!) twice per month. All for spending $2500. What a steal. It reminds me of Candy Crush's 3-star system where the first two stars are trivial, and the third is usually a difficult stretch goal. But here it's just thinly-veiled manipulation with no benefit.

I can tell they're employing some "smarketing" people with big ideas (read: stolen mistakes), but it's just such a fail.

The whole thing is a fail.

I think I nailed it.

I had an interview on Friday. Never had I ever such a good one. Everything went so smoothly I'm amazed to this moment.

It started pretty much normally. Few questions about me and my CV. Next some soft skills check and few minutes talking in English to make sure I know how to speak.

Next, two funny trick questions. I hope I'll translate them good enough.
1) You've got 6 cups in a row. Three of them, next to each other, are empty. Remaining 3 are full. You've got one movement to make them stand alternately, ie. Full, empty, etc. or Empty, full etc.
2) You've got yourself a cake. Normal, birthday cake in a shape of a cylinder. On three cuts, you have to cut it in 8 equal pieces.

Next was technical interview. The only thing I couldn't answer to was a formula to get angle between camera and two objects on the scene. Something about cos x.

They told me that I was the only recruitee to make project using Hololens SDK. Other people made the images gallery in 2D only.

Also they were VERY impressed that I managed to send them fix that changed a lot of the gallery in an hour. No one was expecting it so fast since the feature wasn't all that simple. Or so they said. Code was written so it wasn't hard to implement this change.

Now I've got to wait at least a week for their response. As you could imagine, I'm nervously checking my email each time I get any spam.

I'd like to thank @fire-phoenix and @Root that were responding to my last posts about this new work tasks and current hardships. I know it's a bit too early to celebrate but I'm just so hyped for how well everything went 😀

Just got this spam email, does anyone know what kind of "personal reason" she actually got in github?

They have won my time and respect now, nice.

Earlier I signed up on this forum called NulledBB. Basically some hacker skiddie forum that had a dump of an archive I wanted, unfortunately behind a paywall which I didn't want to bother with.

On signup I noticed that I couldn't use my domain as an email address, as I usually do (the domain is a catch-all which means that mail addresses can be made up for each service I sign up to on the fly, super useful). They did expose the regex that they accepted email as however, which included something along the lines of "@live.*".

So I figured, why not register a subdomain live.nixmagic.com real quick and put that into the mail servers? Didn't take too long and that's what I eventually went with, and registered as somepissedoffsysop@live.nixmagic.com (which I have no trouble putting on a public forum as you'll see in a minute).

Still didn't manage to get that archive I wanted but I figured, fuck it. It's a throwaway account anyway. But eventually that email address started to receive spam. Stupid motherfucker of a forum operator with his Kali skidmachine probably leaked it.

Usually I just blacklist the email address in SpamAssassin by adding an additional spam score of 100 to email sent to such addresses. But in that case it didn't even sit on the main domain, thanks to that stupid regex block from earlier... 😏

*Logs into my domain admin panel*
*Le rm on the live.nixmagic.com record*

Null routed entirely.. nulled, if you will! 🙃

An important message:
PrOpErLy managing servers is HARD.

I get pissed off at customers with ZERO server knowledge who think they can manage their VPS. “Just get a control panel and a VPS” from some flashy provider that makes server management look way too easy.. Clicking around in their fancy control panel, until:

- they need help with their *self-managed* VPS;
- their email ends up in spam;
- they suffer from performance issues;
- they need to restore a backup;
- something breaks, because YES, things break

Way too little people are able to answer:

- when and how do you make backups?
- how do you monitor your servers and which services?
- how do you keep track of trend analysis?

Then I come by with necessary software. SNMP for trend analysis, Graphite for infrastructure health, Sensu for monitoring, Kibana, Ansible for configuration management..

Things that servers need but that customers have never even heard of.. because they can do everything in their control panel..

Until they come crying to me because it broke and they don’t even know how to get into SSH.

I think the ones to blame are VPS providers that tell the tale of how easy it is to install a control panel and never look at your server again.

Customers become responsible for something *business-critical*! Yet they don’t know how it works.

@netikras since when does proprietary mean bad?

Lemme tell you 3 stories.

CISCO AnyConnect:
- come in to the office
- use internal resources (company newsletter, jira, etc.)
- connect to client's VPN using Cisco AnyConnect
- lose access to my company resources, because AnyConnect overwrites routing table (rather normal for VPN clients)
- issue a route command updating routing table so you could reach confluence page in the intranet
- route command executes successfully, `route -n` shows nothing has changed
- google this whole WTF case
- Cisco AnyConnect constantly overwrites OS routing table to ENFORCE you to use VPN settings and nothing else.

Sooo basically if you want to check your company's email, you have to disconnect from client's VPN, check email and reconnect again. Neat!

Can be easily resolved by using opensource VPN client -- openconnect

CISCO AnyConnect:
- get a server in your company
- connect it to client's VPN and keep the VPN running for data sync. VPN has to be UP at all times
- network glitch [uh-oh]
- VPN is no longer working, AnyConnect still believes everything is peachy. No reconnect attempts.
- service is unable to sync data w/ client's systems. Data gets outdated and eventually corrupted

OpenConnect (OSS alternative to AnyConnect) detects all network glitches, reports them to the log and attempts reconnect immediatelly. Subsequent reconnect attempts getting triggered with longer delays to not to spam network.

SYMANTEC VIP (alleged 2FA?):
- client's portal requires Sym VIP otp code to log in
- open up a browser in your laptop
- navigate to the portal
- enter your credentials
- click on a Sym VIP icon in the systray
- write down the shown otp number
- log in

umm... in what fucking way is that a secure 2FA? Everything is IN the same fucking device, a single click away.

Can be easily solved by opensource alternatives to Sym VIP app: they make HTTP calls to Symantec to register a new token and return you the whole totp url. You can convert that url to a qr code and scan it w/ your phone (e.g. Google's Authenticator). Now you have a true 2FA.

Proprietary is not always bad. There are good propr sw too. But the ones that are core to your BAU and are doing shit -- well these ARE bad. and w/o an oppurtunity to workaround/fix it yourself.

I love it when unethical companies' marketing chaps assume that I care about their SMS garbage more than I get pissed off by it. Damart, I didn't even know about your existence or what the hell you do as a business (selling woman clothes apparently.. am I a woman?!) until you shoved your ad crap into my face, and Unigro I really don't have a pending contract with you so kindly fuck off with your reminders (that are in French but am I a Walloon? No!).

Makes me wonder though, with email I usually just give everyone a different email address to deflect spam - since I can reroute email to any particular address straight to /dev/null on the server if so desired. With SMS and SIM cards that isn't really possible.. hence why I'm always so hesitant about sharing my phone number. In email the addresses are scraped off the internet.. but phone numbers? How do such shitcompanies even obtain those?! Their level of pushiness and unethical behavior boggles my mind.

Client: Hey the contact form doesn't bring the message to my email inbox
Me: Check your spam folder
Client: what is a spam folder
Me:😬

It's finally happened. I've used my mail servers for about a year to give out different email addresses on my domain to things I sign up for online, and only used my "actual" email address that received all this email for the whole domain but the single one that I used outbound for private communications.

This worked well for a long time as I could see when spam comes in, where it came from by looking at the email address I designated it. Each company's email would be sent not only from an email address that they choose, but also to an email address that I choose. It allowed me to easily determine where there were problems. For example, on Freenode IRC my vhost happened to make my username@host there a valid email address. It eventually got blacklisted due to too much incoming spam as crawlers started detecting it. Another one was "nickname"@my.domain as I posted it a few times here. Got crawled as well. But it allowed me to easily blacklist each.

I'd never thought my actual outbound email address, my real one, to get crawled though. That would require the mail server of a company I explicitly communicated with to get hacked. But today that happened. I wonder whose it is, but I can't tell.

Time to make my outgoing email bound to a designated email address as well. I want to know which companies this happens to, even if they don't disclose it.

Amazon: you're logged into 53 devices.

Me: ooooh Kay, since when do I have that many devices. let's sign out of em all and change the password for some piece of mind.

Spongebob: * a few hours past *

Spam email: someone in the US has logged into your account - click here to verify through some random URL that doesn't even contain "Amazon" in it 🥳

-

I suddenly have that feeling Amazon sells you're account setting changes and not just your personal details.

Stakeholder: Our customers aren’t getting their order confirmation emails. It’s going to their spam. Is there a way to resend the emails?

Me: Wait. The email getting sent to their spam is not the same as not getting the email. Is it both or just one of those things?

SH: Here are some emails getting sent to spam.

Me: These are sent by third party vendors that you contract with. I have no control over what they do. You need to talk to your vendors.

SH: 😮

Me: 😑

[more or less rant]

FUCK YOU ENKI! I just received this spam email with a very important question:

the internet was so good before corporate interests took everything over and made it garbage

before you found real people, instead of shills
real hobbies, instead of someone wanting to sell you knockoff shit by pretending to have information on your hobby
real information, instead of stupid politics which pretend information doesn't exist and keep changing Wikipedia pages or brigading forums with spam or reporting websites or servers as violating rules to remove innocent people and ruin their shit

before you could find tools and use them
and there were no ads
even when there were ads they were just banner ads where you got free iPods and maybe a virus
but they didn't subscribe you to their service monthly and then play psychological tricks on you so you couldn't cancel
even when the popups came we had popup blockers, and the web browsers were on our side and made the feature widespread and viewed the popups as malicious, and now the world's biggest ad company serves the most popular "open source" browser and is in a war against usability because they have to display their brain malware ads to you or else

and you'd get excited to get an email, instead of annoyed it's more fucking corporate spam you don't want from a random website that required you to give your email address so you could've bought a trinket for your friend Bob's birthday that one time and now their subscriber list keeps "forgetting" you unsubscribed

phones have a billion sensors but the app stores are so infested with bullshit none of it matters
it's all rot
everything is starving and making your life worse

we used to do so much with so little
and now we have so much and leave it all on the table to throw poop at each other

don't forget that brigade science tells you nostalgia is you remembering something to be better than it was. be gaslit. webpages disappear now, too. they get changed. archive.org has the records, and got DDoSed the other day. I knew this day would happen. everyone who lies would love for there to be no archives, no records. to burn the modern books

Apparently some fucking moron bot has started sending spam messages to random people using my email address in the 'from' field.

From: my@address.fuck
Subject: I want to feel the passion with you.

I know because I just received a Delivery Status Notification containing the full spam email.

Fuck you spammers and scammers. Wish you a horrible and slow death in a mincer.

Often I hear that one should block spam email based on content match rather than IP match. Sometimes even that blocking Chinese ranges in particular is prejudiced and racist. Allow me to debunk that after I've been looking at traffic on port 25 with tcpdump for several weeks now, and got rid of most of my incoming spam too.

There are these spamhausen that communicate with my mail server as much as every minute.
- biz-smtp.com
- mailing-expert.com
- smtp-shop.com

All of them are Chinese. They make up - rough guess - around 90% of the traffic that hits my edge nodes, if not more.

The network ranges I've blocked are apparently as follows:
- 193.106.175.0/24 (Russia)
- 49.64.0.0/11 (China)
- 181.39.88.172 (Ecuador)
- 188.130.160.216 (Russia)
- 106.75.144.0/20 (China)
- 183.227.0.0/16 (China)
- 106.75.32.0/19 (China)
.. apparently I blocked that one twice, heh
- 116.16.0.0/12 (China)
- 123.58.160.0/19 (China)

It's not all China but holy hell, a lot of spam sure comes from there, given how Golden Shield supposedly blocks internet access to the Chinese citizens. A friend of mine who lives in China (how he got past the firewall is beyond me, and he won't tell me either) told me that while incoming information is "regulated", they don't give half a shit about outgoing traffic to foreign countries. Hence all those shitty filter bag suppliers and whatnot. The Chinese government doesn't care.

So what is the alternative like, that would block based on content? Well there are a few solutions out there, namely SpamAssassin, ClamAV and Amavis among others. The problem is that they're all very memory intensive (especially compared to e.g. Postfix and Dovecot themselves) and that they must scan every email, and keep up with evasion techniques (such as putting the content in an image, or using characters from different character sets t̾h̾a̾t̾ ̾l̾o̾o̾k̾ ̾s̾i̾m̾i̾l̾a̾r̾).

But the thing is, all of that traffic comes from a certain few offending IP ranges, and an iptables rule that covers a whole range is very cheap. China (or any country for that matter) has too many IP ranges to block all of them. But the certain few offending IP ranges? I'll take a cheap IP-based filter over expensive content-based filters any day. And I don't want to be shamed for that.

So... I’m sitting here doing pretty much nothing, just reading through some rants when all of a sudden I get a wave of emails.

Pinterest!
We noticed a login from a new device or location and want to make sure it’s you.
Device: Firefox, Windows 8
Where: New Jersey, United States (Approximate)

OhhhhhKay then... so there’s a couple of problems with this, 1 I didn’t even know I had a Pinterest account, 2 I don’t have Pinterest in my password manager either.

So I follow the link and fair enough it’s actually pintest, so I attempt to login, to no avail, oh maybe it’s a social login..., ok let’s try google, nope that wasn’t it, deletes account, logins with Facebook, oh here we go, checks logins, 1 random jersey player, deletes account, swaps to Facebook, changes password (this fucker was already 100+ characters) and adds 2FA and contains no new logins 🤔

Ok... so what the fuck, either someone managed to get through a long ass password or something phishy is going on, the email for FB logins is seldomly used (maybe a handful of services at best) as I have another for all the junk and spam bullshit I expect from today’s “marketing”

TL;DR
This works: email+rant@domain.com

Spam filtering protip:

Did you know that the email spec allows you to use youremail+something@domain.com and the emails still come to you. This is especially useful when registering to a lot of places where you are not sure whether they will spam you or not. Filtering will be easy because you have a unique email address for each service. Also you can find out which service leaked your email address to spammers.

Additionally if you want to register to a service with two accounts but still want to use the same email, you can do this easily by adding +whatever in your email address.

Checking the spam folder...
Damn, I am rich...

This is somehow fun xD

Wow, I just realized the marketing teams of most of the companies I have been dealing with are some cold sociopaths.

Every other letter that pops in the mailbox is filled with dark patterns trying to guilt me into opting in to their continued spam:

Subject: Most awesome husky puppy!

Look at this beautiful husky puppy. Isn't it beautiful.... It would be sad if something happened to it... But I am afraid... Something will happen to it...

If you don't opt in to our email message... I am afraid we have no choice... We have to kill this puppy. End it's life... We have no choice. I wish we did! Nothing would please us more than keeping this beautiful-beautiful puppy living and playing....

But if you don't opt in... We have to cut it's throat. Leave it lying on the ground, bleeding out as the life slowly fades away from it's pretty blue eyes...

And Remember: it's not us who killed it... IT WAS YOU! YOUR ACTIONS LEAD TO THE DEATH OF THIS PUPPY! YOU.... YOU FILTHY MURDERER!

Pls opt-in ok, then we are all good. Puppy lives! Just opt in. Ok? Yeah, you know what you have to do.

First spam email: $120,000
Second spam email: $160,000

Waiting for the third spam email 😎

Wow! They are incredible!

I keep creating new email filters every week or so, and they keep finding new ways to send me spam!

The best part is - these emails are sent from our internal infra. Judging by the sender it looks like they have created a bot collecting various events and sending them to... everyone.

Much smart. Many useful.
Much working

Luv this fake email I received yesterday, didn't know Microsoft used DPD to deliver their emails lol!!!

This will be long and it's more of an IT rant, but I think it still fits.

So a user comes to me and says "hey on my phone I can't see anything in my junk email folder but there are a bunch of emails in there on my PC." I take a look at the Outlook app on his phone. The "Junk" folder that he has open is actually in his deleted items folder. So clearly it's not the real junk folder. There are no other folders named "Junk", but there is one named "Spam". I open that and there are a bunch of emails in there.

ME: "Does this look like what you were expecting to see?"
USER: "Oooohhh so you think it's called "Spam" instead of "Junk" on my phone?"
ME: "I'm not sure, does this look like what you were expecting to see?"
USER: "See, I always thought junk and spam were two different things."
ME: (grinding my teeth and taking a deep breath) "Does. This. Look. Like. What. You. Were. Expecting. To. See?"
USER: "Yeah, looks like it."

OK THEN FRICKING TAKE YOUR PHONE AND GET OUT OF MY OFFICE.

I didn't really say that last bit, but I sure was tempted to.

I put my email address on my website. Why? Because I want to train/test my spam filter. :)

is google fucking with me today?

today i was accepted for some google summer internship program thing. they send me a google form right? so i open it up in chromium and it doesn’t work. it doesn’t let me type in any textboxes or anything. i try to fix it and no luck. then, i copy the link to firefox and voilà, it works.

so, google forms didn’t work in chromium but did in firefox? alright. then i check off yes, send me a copy of my responses to my gmail account. and guess what? gmail classified that as SPAM. google email classified a google forms email as spam.

good work google, you’re fucking stupid.

A few days ago Aruba Cloud terminated my VPS's without notice (shortly after my previous rant about email spam). The reason behind it is rather mundane - while slightly tipsy I wanted to send some traffic back to those Chinese smtp-shop assholes.

Around half an hour later I found that e1.nixmagic.com had lost its network link. I logged into the admin panel at Aruba and connected to the recovery console. In the kernel log there was a mention of the main network link being unresponsive. Apparently Aruba Cloud's automated systems had cut it off.

Shortly afterwards I got an email about the suspension, requested that I get back to them within 72 hours.. despite the email being from a noreply address. Big brain right there.

Now one server wasn't yet a reason to consider this a major outage. I did have 3 edge nodes, all of which had equal duties and importance in the network. However an hour later I found that Aruba had also shut down the other 2 instances, despite those doing nothing wrong. Another hour later I found my account limited, unable to login to the admin panel. Oh and did I mention that for anything in that admin panel, you have to login to the customer area first? And that the account ID used to login there is more secure than the password? Yeah their password security is that good. Normally my passwords would be 64 random characters.. not there.

So with all my servers now gone, I immediately considered it an emergency. Aruba's employees had already left the office, and wouldn't get back to me until the next day (on-call be damned I guess?). So I had to immediately pull an all-nighter and deploy new servers elsewhere and move my DNS records to those ASAP. For that I chose Hetzner.

Now at Hetzner I was actually very pleasantly surprised at just how clean the interface was, how it puts the project front and center in everything, and just tells you "this is what this is and what it does", nothing else. Despite being a sysadmin myself, I find the hosting part of it insignificant. The project - the application that is to be hosted - that's what's important. Administration of a datacenter on the other hand is background stuff. Aruba's interface is very cluttered, on Hetzner it's super clean. Night and day difference.

Oh and the specs are better for the same price, the password security is actually decent, and the servers are already up despite me not having paid for anything yet. That's incredible if you ask me.. they actually trust a new customer to pay the bills afterwards. How about you Aruba Cloud? Oh yeah.. too much to ask for right. Even the network isn't something you can trust a long-time customer of yours with.

So everything has been set up again now, and there are some things I would like to stress about hosting providers.

You don't own the hardware. While you do have root access, you don't have hardware access at all. Remember that therefore you can't store anything on it that you can't afford to lose, have stolen, or otherwise compromised. This is something I kept in mind when I made my servers. The edge nodes do nothing but reverse proxying the services from my LXC containers at home. Therefore the edge nodes could go down, while the worker nodes still kept running. All that was necessary was a new set of reverse proxies. On the other hand, if e.g. my Gitea server were to be hosted directly on those VPS's, losing that would've been devastating. All my configs, projects, mirrors and shit are hosted there.

Also remember that your hosting provider can terminate you at any time, for any reason. Server redundancy is not enough. If you can afford multiple redundant servers, get them at different hosting providers. I've looked at Aruba Cloud's Terms of Use and this is indeed something they were legally allowed to do. Any reason, any time, no notice. They covered all their bases. Make sure you do too, and hope that you'll never need it.

Oh, right - this is a rant - Aruba Cloud you are a bunch of assholes. Kindly take a 1Gbps DDoS attack up your ass in exchange for that termination without notice, will you?

"I didn't get the email. I checked my spam folder"

"Did you check your trunk folder? I've heard there's junk in your trunk"

WTF Woke up this morning and found my email used to register to a website called fiverr.com!!

What is even worse is that at the end of the email where they have that section of: this email was sent to ..., the name is random letters

Even more ironic that website does not allow access from Lebanon ....

I think it is time to change my email, been getting a lot of spam into my inbox lately, though Gmail has a good spam filter :\

I guess that counts? Some of the local burger kings once had an online game they advertised, where you could win free burgers if you are the first on the highscore (the other 2 places got some sort of coupons for cheaper meals), turned out there was a score submit bug you could abuse after finishing a game (me and a colleague noticed, while trying to find some sort of bug), when I reported it they didnt care (didn't get any response, maybe spam filtered?), so I got us some free burgers, scanned in the receipt and send it again, they paniced or just realized you can generate any amount of free burgers for the time of the game being online, took down the game for a day or two, sent me a short email thanking me, thats it.

My job sends out emails with things like "You won a prize!" In the subject line with embarrassingly vague reasons to click the links in the email. If you do, the links take you to a site where they slap your wrists for clicking an unknown link and teach you about the dangers of phishing.

It's fake spam. Ironically enough, though, it's the ONLY spam I ever get. It's more annoying than real spam because it never gets blocked by the system like an actual phishing attack would...

It is driving me crazy having to delete these stupid messages every day and they're clogging up my otherwise clean inbox! I don't even know who to contact about this bullshit because they're so "haha we got you!" about it, there's no department claiming responsibility. They're creating their own spam trying to prevent spam. What the hell?

There you are, fiddling with next.js webpack settings, because your isomorphic JS-in-CSS-in-JS SSR fallback from react-native-web to react-dom throws a runtime error on your SSR prerendering server during isomorphic asynchronous data prefetching from Kubernetes backend-for-frontend edge-server with GraphQL.

You have all that tech to display a landing page with an email form, just to send spam emails with ten tracking links and five tracking beacons per email.

Your product can be replaced by an Excel document made in two days.

It was developed in two years by a team of ten developers crunching every day under twelve project managers that can be replaced with a parrot trained to say “Any updates?”

Your evaluation is $5M+. You have 10,000 dependency security warnings, 1000 likes on Product Hunt, 500 comments on Hacker News, and a popular Twitter account.

Your future looks bright. You finish your coffee, crack your knuckles and carry on writing unit tests.

Extract from a quite old recruiter email (excluding the formalities):

Position: junior dev
Workplace: office for first year, can be changed to remote after (salary will be 50% lower if you go remote though) *suspicion levels starts raising*
Payment: 1€ per line of code (empty lines/comments excluded) or page of documentation *alarms start ringing*
Additional info: on high alert for 4 weeks every 6 weeks *wtf is going on*, salary bonus is 10€ per week *I stopped reading here and moved the email directly to the spam folder*

The unsubscribe link on the emails from whois.com redirects you to a fucking PDF with written instructions on how to unsubscribe...
Are you fucking kidding me?

I have to go on your website, login, go through 4 fucking sections in the settings to finally select "NO" in a radio button???
It should be illegal.

BRUV,
WTF,
SO I JUST FOUND OUT THIS:
Hostinger changed its mailservers from mx1.hostinger.com, to IMAP.hostinger.com and SMTP.HOSTINGER.COM

This means that all of the emails that I sent out for the last 2 weeks on my phone(the only place where I send out emails) has been going to fadoodle knows where?

Now that I changed on my phone the incoming and sending servers and I send out a email it appears as spam, but It dosent do that when I send it out of the web platform.

So like bruv, more digging to do...

HOSTINGER U BICH ASS FUCKING CUNTS, DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY EMAILS I NEEDED TO FORWARD BCZ OF THIS???😂

And I though people were Beeing rude or something

The mother of my partner sent to us an email complaining that our home is too dirty...
We solved the problem adding a new spam filter.

Right so I have to subscribe for this website's spam to remove the already spammed inbox.

Fuck logic

When you survive WannaCry but now your email inbox is full of spam from antivirus companies explaining how they could've helped you.
Nobody was ever safe.

Am I the only guy using the GDPR emails as a to-do list? For each email I either delete the account with that service OR I take the opportunity to change the password. Tedious? Yeah. Satisfying? You bet!

I see all these people complaining about their inbox blowing up with "spam" but how many of those accounts or services do you still use? I bet over half of them were only signed up for to try their demo and then forgotten about.

Here's an advice to you guys:

Ever look at your mailbox and think it's so full of junk?

Archive all your current emails.

Then next time you get any spam emails take the time to unsubscribe or block the sender.

Trust me, life is so much better after you've got rid of those craps. And it's not that hard like it seems. In a week you'll probably get rid if 90% of those.

So some asshole keeps sending phishing emails to every student and prof in our university and the IT department is too pathetic to block it. They all come from the same email and contain the same text yet they cant filter it and just send warnings not to click it.

Im getting sick of recieving 5 of these a day, i scanned and viewed the page and its just a simple form copying the outlook login page with a redirect to the actual page after submission.

Whats the easiest way to write a script that will spam them with thousands of fake accounts? How can i fuck with these guys?

gnaahhh my callendar is suddenly full of "free iphone xs" spam and i can't find that stupid invite email 😡

How ethical it is to send 1gb email with big picture with word “NO” in response to spam email that wants my agreement ?

I was working on email reporting to business customers and in the test phase was mass sending email to my own account. However it suddenly stopped working and it took me a few minutes to realize I had commented out the hardcoded line with my email address. I had to write to each Customer and apologize for the spam after my error. Also had to get whitelisted our email server after the incident with a few.

Now this has take my faith away from any email I receive... Fuck that shit, Suggest me ideas to reverse spam them.

Me: *Chilling a little during a stressful day*

*Receive an email, because thankfully I am logged in and checking emails continuously as I am on job hunt*

*Click open*

Recruiter: I am over running a meeting, will join our connect in 10 minutes.

Me: *Trying to recall when did she schedule the call*

*Quickly check and figure that I shared my availability but never got a confirmation or a meeting invite*

Me: Apologies, but I never received any confirmation. I was waiting for your invite.

Recruiter: What? When did you reschedule?

Me: I never did. I never got a confirmation. Anyway, I am free so can hop on a call.

Recruiter: Oh! Sometimes the confirmation goes into the spam box. Here's the link, please join..

I join and she grills me with difficult questions that I am evidently not prepared.

I try to answer and be honest with everything.

But what the actual fuck! She lied to me and grilled me unnecessarily when she knew I wasn't even prepared.

And this is one of top global companies. Definitely not a great experience.

Stop lying and finding a reason to blame me for failing me because you are an incompetent fuck.

Uh-oh I fucked up.

Not at work, but with my website where I had an email forwarder to an external address. The forwarding was everything so that I could do the spam filtering and occasional check in one place. Unfortunately, that triggered the spam detection at the external address (after some years!), and my provider ended up on a blacklist.

That got me a pretty angry mail from my hosting provider who had already disabled the forwarding and wanted to make sure that I understood the issue and would not put it in again.

I thought about whether they had fucked up because it was even possible to do that, or whether I had fucked up because I should have known. Hm yeah I opted for the latter and apologised.

The support guy seemed happy that I didn't try to argue (possibly like other customers...), and advised that I just should add another account in my email client. Sure, at least that will prevent this shit from happening again.

He also mentioned that every single blacklist issue they had experienced in this year was accidental due to external forwarding issues and that they would consider just disabling it altogether.

Which is probably a smart move, just as hint for these ranters here who work at hosting companies. Or at least only enable external forwarding if spam assassin or so is in place.

Email is horrible.

CSS in email is fucked.

People never check their spam filter / who the fuck knows when the spam filter might decide legit shit is spam.

Every other god damn day some new shit comes up.

Today some sort of either antivirus or email filter or spam / malware detecting shit seems to be crawling every fucking link in an email our customer's send to their customer's.

Activating every option such as declining shit or accepting it... well actually ALL THOSE OPTIONS.

End user can't tell of course so I (and others) have to find this out.

(ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻

Every website with a newsletter that you can't unsubscribe with just one click, but instead you have to log in, and go to settings, and select the fucking unsubscribe option, should be BANNED from internet!
In most cases this kind of website is unusable with a smartphone, or at least only the settings page is not responsive, to make it more difficult to fucking unsubuscribe.

I'm trying to unsubscribe from a fucking website since 2016, but every time I open the email with my smartphone it's just impossible to do it, and I forgot every time to do it when I'm using a PC.

Now, after a few months I received this fucking SPAM when I was using my PC, but I forgot my password, and the recovery password option just doesn't work, so I still can't do it!

If you're one of these fucking developers, there is a special place for you in hell.
Even if the decision to make it so fucking dumb isn't yours, you are still accomplice, because you should have leave this fucking job.

Trying to reach a spam score lower than 4 with my HTML emails is the worst time I have ever had while developing.

Go fuck yourself, horrible email standards.
Go fuck yourself Gmail, for blocking images.
Go fuck yourself, conflicting standards.

This shit is just an absolute shit show.

Every website we craft at work has some email substitution logic so that addresses you see on the site don't actually exist in the HTML source like that (you wouldn't find them in a format like "foo@example.com").

Instead the @ and the period right before the TLD get replaced with something else (to prevent (dumb) spam bots from using that address and blast it with junk).

Some people replaced them with images in the past (ew), replaced the @ with "(at)" or other stuff.

I made it a habit to render the @ and . by replacing them with span tags which then get a ::before in CSS that contains "content: '@';", so that the @ is visible but is not actually inside the HTML source code.

The classes for these spans then have a random name (persistent for that website though). The first one was called "move-along-nothing-to-see-here", but then I started naming them after Star Wars quotes.

One website's @ class is called "that-s-no-moon" (Obi Wan), others are called "i-have-a-bad-feeling-about-this" (Han Solo), "powerful-you-have-become-the-dark-side-I-sense-in-you." (Yoda) and "these-are-not-the-droids-you-are-looking-for" (Obi Wan).

I wonder what is my family name.

(Insert confused face emoji here)

Godaddy protects spammers

When you find that a domain that is sending spam is hosted by Godaddy you send it to abuse@godaddy.com. They in turn send you message saying for spam go to the ftc.gov. The ftc.gov says to go to the email host and report to their abuse account. Neither party has an interest in stopping spam anymore.

So Godaddy supports and protects spammers.

How to make those marketing staff of x service stop sending you an email when they don't have unsubscribe link:

1. Reply back asking about the free tier/plan
2. Profit!

2 days and no word from them after spamming me daily about the service

When you sign up for an email/api service and the confirmation email they send you goes to the spam folder....

not a good look

Spam assassin kills most of the spam I get before I see it. It works pretty well. However, I started getting a fuck ton of spam from some asshole on a Turkey server. You cannot forward spam to the gov anymore so what to do (They use a honeypot. Apparently it doesn't catch everything.)? Well I got the abuse email account address for the server. Then I went into my servers spam filter for the email address I am having issues with. Then I redirect the email to this abuse email address. Then I delete it from the server. This makes it so my email client never sees the message and I automagically notify the abuse account. If the abuse account is owned by the spammer then he is just filling up his own server with shit.

Anybody else have fun or interesting ways with dealing with spam the regular filters don't catch?

Fuck you Twillio.
You bought a perfectly good email service (SendGrid) and now this service is just.. failing.
All of theirs Ips are getting blacklisted. Our clients are calling us (Of course they are).
People cannot reset passwords, cannot get ANY email notification.
Right now, SendGrid is blacklisted by majority of anti spam systems.
Twilio, fuck you again. This service we were using for more than 5 years without ANY problem. Twilio fucked up.
Fuck you Twlio again. And when we create a “critical” ticket, all you have to say is “Meehhh we’ll contact you in a week” ? REALLY ? Even Microsoft contacts us in 2 hours for critical problems.
Sorry it needed to come out.

It all started with an undelivereable e-mail.

New manager (soon-to-be boss) walks into admin guy's office and complains about an e-mail he sent to a customer being rejected by the recipient's mail server. I can hear parts of the conversation from my office across the floor.

Recipient uses the spamcop.net blacklist and our mail was rejected since it came from an IP address known to be sending mails to their spamtrap.

Admin guy wants to verify the claim by trying to find out our static public IPv4 address, to compare it to the blacklisted one from the notification.
For half an hour boss and him are trying to find the correct login credentials for the telco's customer-self-care web interface.
Eventually they call telco's support to get new credentials, it turned out during the VoIP migration about six months ago we got new credentials that were apparently not noted anywhere.

Eventually admin guy can log in, and wonders why he can't see any static IP address listed there, calls support again. Turns out we were not even using a static IP address anymore since the VoIP change. Now it's not like we would be hosting any services that need to be publicly accessible, nor would all users send their e-mail via a local server (at least my machine is already configured to talk directly to the telco's smtp, but this was supposedly different in the good ol' days, so I'm not sure whether it still applies to some users).

In any case, the e-mail issue seems completely forgotten by now: Admin guy wants his static ip address back, negotiates with telco support.
The change will require new PPPoE credentials for the VDSL line, he apparently received them over the phone(?) and should update them in the CPE after they had disabled the login for the dynamic address. Obviously something went wrong, admin guy meanwhile having to use his private phone to call support, claims the credentials would be reverted immediately when he changed them in the CPE Web UI.

Now I'm not exactly sure why, there's two scenarios I could imagine:
- Maybe telco would use TR-069/CWMP to remotely provision the credentials which are not updated in their system, thus overwriting CPE to the old ones and don't allow for manual changes, or
- Maybe just a browser issue. The CPE's login page is not even rendered correctly in my browser, but then again I'm the only one at the company using Firefox Private Mode with Ghostery, so it can't be reproduced on another machine. At least viewing the login/status page works with IE11 though, no idea how badly-written the config stuff itself might be.

Many hours pass, I enjoy not being annoyed by incoming phone calls for the rest of the day. Boss is slightly less happy, no internet and no incoming calls.

Next morning, windows would ask me to classify this new network as public/work/private - apparently someone tried factory-resetting the CPE. Or did they even get a replacement!? Still no internet though.
Hours later, everything finally back to normal, no idea what exactly happened - but we have our old static IPv4 address back, still wondering what we need it for.

Oh, and the blacklisted IP address was just the telco's mail server, of course. They end up on the spamcop list every once in a while.

tl;dr: if you're running a business in Germany that needs e-mail, just don't send it via the big magenta monopoly - you would end up sharing the same mail servers with tons of small businesses that might not employ the most qualified people for securing their stuff, so they will naturally be pwned and abused for spam every once in a while, having your mailservers blacklisted.

I'm waiting for the day when the next e-mail will be blocked and manager / boss eventually wonder how the 24-hours-outage did not even fix aynything in the end...

Today, I got my first recruiter spam (read: unsolicited) email! If they get more common than that, I'll have to build a filter for those.

My main mailbox is so full of spam i almost missed a good job test. Wtf
And these mails are so fucking irrelevant loan, cars, bank, life insurances... I DON'T FUCKING CARE ABOUT THEM, WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU FILLING MY MAILBOX YOU ASSHOLES 😠😠😠

and what's even more weird is how they all have one common sentence in exact formatting : "you can simply WIPE Out your mail from the mailing list".

I feel as if my email has been hacked. Any suggestions?

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck FUCK FUCK YOU GOOGLE, you placed a damn email about an interview in the spam box and I only realized it 2 weeks afterwards. END ME, JUST DO IT NOW

My IT-teacher has a website. Aside from it looking like from 1980 (which is ok), he has a "security js Mail decryption":
In his page there is a <script> with a simple yet custom de/encrypt function. Then his E-Mail is an <a href="javascript:mailto:function('rubberish173848'>private email</a>. (Or something like that)

You can just run this link (open email app and read it) or use the same function and same href in the browser console and read it. It sounds so stupid.

(Yet I figured out he probably doesn't want bots to spam his mail, so maybe I am stupid)

Modern technology is absolutely bullshit

I can't even

Now my keyboard on my phone is even too broken to complain about it

I wanted to look at someone's post history on a forum

To do so the forum wants an account. Ok. So I gave it my old junk Hotmail account during sign up for it to send me an email confirm so I can make the account so I can search. Well I'm refreshing this account for this confirm account email through the Gmail app on my phone because who even checks emails on computers anymore

Turns out, aside from this Hotmail spam email account having a lot of junk emails (it is my junk email account), there's this little pop-up that happens SOMETIMES claiming that it can't sync. I checked inbox and spam and the email isn't in there. So 1 out of 10 times I refresh there's this little "cannot sync" message that pops up and I click it. It claims my storage on my phone is too full to sync. Ok.

So I go try to find storage through the settings in my phone. It doesn't exist as a category anymore apparently. Thankfully phones have a search feature now -- because we can't have sane settings anymore so here's a search feature. First result it gives me is just device info. That's useless. It's just the hardware specs for my phone

Second it shows storage. 90% full apparently. That's odd. I have 132 gb. Thankfully it subdivided it by what's taking up space but it doesn't make much sense and a bunch of the categories don't open to anything

Apparently the fucking android operating system is 32 GB now? Well you're fucked if you wanna remove that. Apparently years of photos and videos is 20 gb, I can back those up and delete them. Similarly I have downloads in folders, and that's about 20 gb

Why are there 20 GB of apps? I literally have no apps!

Part of apps? Wtf is Gboard and why is it a gig

Why is my WEATHER APP using a gig of storage?

And none of the apps can I remove the storage they're using. The cache is like 600kb, and I can delete all data and it's using like 60 MB. So the fucking weather app executable itself is a gig of space? Wtf?

I deleted the data for Gboard and turns out that's the keyboard. So now all my keyboard settings are fucked.

Thankfully I wrote syncing scripts ages ago to sync various folders from my phone to my external HDD. I just had to connect it to the laptop and run the script on the external HDD. Problem? Well turns out no matter what I do I can't get the laptop to connect to the phone if it's USB file transfer mode. I can do photos. But this is gonna be more than photos.

So I do my sync backup script from the laptop to the external HDD. This will sync the camera, since I have sync thing sync my laptop and phone all the time, so I can just sync the laptop to the external HDD and then delete the older photos and get 20gb. Quick fix for now

Why do I need this quick fix?
Well
Get this
I've been having issues with my Gmail client for ages. It just won't display new email notifications which is really annoying because I need to know when emails get sent to me.
Now I'm thinking, maybe I can de-sync older emails and have more storage space maybe? But that's not an option anywhere. Actually, I can't even unconnect an email address from my phone. Gmail doesn't even let you do that

What the flying fuck is the state of modern technology

Now I have to go figure out what my fucking settings were for my stupid phone keyboard

The 90s were much fucking saner than this garbage. I don't need a 32 GB operating system on a phone. Is this fucking windows 8? And let me fucking tell YOU how many fucking emails you should sync to my phone. Holy shit what the fuck is all this

At least my Linux scripts fucking work like I wrote them

WHAT THE FUCKING SHIT DO YOU WANT FROM ME??! I LITERALLY GET SPAM MAILS EVERY 5 MINUTES (i know I know, some of you get more than that) ABOUT BITCOIN. I NEVER DID ANYTHING FUCKING RELATED TO CRYPTO CURRENCY! HOW DO YOU KNOW MY EMAIL?? LIKE WTF. I'm sitting here doing my stuff and every few minutes my phone starts ringing and I'm like "hey maybe person x answered or something else important happened" but when I actually look at it to see whats up it's just a fucking email about bitcoin being outdated and it tells me to maybe invest into other crypto currencies. After actually reading one of the spam mails because I was interested in what they actually want from me I had to find out that they do not even mention any other currency or website. WTF INTERNET?? WHAT DO YOU WANT?

Hi FuLlStAcKcLoWn,

I fOuNd A fEw ErRoRs On YoUr SiTe.

MaY i SeNd OvEr SoMe Of ThOsE eRrOrS aNd AuDiT rEpOrT wItH pRiCeS?

i’m LoOkInG fOrWaRd To YoUr RePlY

bEsT rEgArDs

god this is getting repetitive, how can we spam the spammers? wasn't there a site like "send your enemies glitter"? classic!

i guess this is what I get for putting my company email public

but really, what happened to gmail's spam filter? should spot ones like these from miles away

Writing an email

and not getting any reply..

Here is a little story about why I do not like to have to purchase developer tools and libraries..

Long story short it has taken at least 10 people more than 3 months to purchase two licenses of this component library which we still do not yet have licenses for.

It all starts with this guy who works here and has the job title 'solution architect'. He saw an ad on a website about some html component library. Then he asks me and the other developer here to look at it. He is super excited saying things like if we save only x days of time the cost is nothing in comparison to developer time..

The other developer and I both spend a few days reading the docs and trying some sample code. It offers some things we can use but I suggest not bothering with it.

Despite my suggestion he goes to the technical manager and they write up a business case. After about a month our receptionist cc me on an email chain from the it commercial manager who is asking for the licensing information so they can add the component creator as a vendor in the purchasing system. I send them a link to the component website which lists all that.

Jump forward two more months to last week and I got a spam email from the component company saying they have some new version out. I am wondering what has happened so I ask our receptionist she says it is with accounts payable and waiting payment - but it is marked urgent and she will find out.

Today I am cc in an email saying they have paid for it two weeks ago. So where is the license info? Nobody knows.

So CyberCoders automatically added me to a mailing list and kept emailing me spam about resumes of developers. Not being in a recruitment position, I decided to "opt out".

I had to fucking prove I'm human... to opt out of an email some machine added me to.

Allow me to add a poorly done image to express my feelings on this matter.

If I could I just wouldn't support email in any way shape anymore.

It's just too much hassle with all the spam filters and people just don't understand how email works.

Nobody fucking reads it anyway.... but everyone wants like a bazillion variations on stupid emails that go out that nobody will read.

They don't get that email is often instant ... but is actually async.

They don't understand that just because they got an email sent to their own distribution list ... and someone took them off the list... that doesn't mean that WE an outside group emailing that list stopped sending them messages.

Nobody actually looks at their spam filters until I tell them to do it for the 3rd time. And as if by magic folks at the same company don't 'have spam filter problems all the time'.

I had a company 'security' filter that straight up followed all the links in an email (that's fine ... we're good, I get that).... and then their stupid bot or whatever would actually click options on a form and fucking submit the fucking form!!!!!

I mean I get that maybe some sites have folks submit some shit and then deliver malware but that's gonna have consequences submitting shit none the less because I don't know it's just your fucking bot...

So they'd get various offers from our customers and bitch when they went to find it was already gone.

Creating a Microsoft account was a mistake. They just spam your email constantly from different emails they own, and there's no unsubscribe button. Instead, email footer says “this email is a part of limited promotional email series” or some other BS like that. And you bet, there is no email preferences anywhere in settings.

This is why I use email aliases. Instead of bowing to those bastards, contacting their “support” and begging to stop, I just disable the alias I used to create their account. Boom, done. When I need a login code or some other shit, I'll re-enable that alias, get my code, and then shut it off again.

My inbox is _my_ inbox.

No, I'm not interested in your credit card offer 😬

I need a spam filter for my mailbox like my email 👻

There are a few email addresses on my domain that I keep on receiving spam on, because I shared them on forums or whatever and crawlers picked it up.

I run Postfix for a mail server in a catch-all configuration. For whatever reason in this setup blacklisting email addresses doesn't work, and given Postfix' complexity I gave up after a few days. Instead I wrote a little bash script called "unspam" to log into the mail server, grep all the emails in the mail directory for those particular email addresses, and move whatever comes up to the .Junk directory.

On SSD it seems reasonably fast, and ZFS caching sure helps a lot too (although limited to 1GB memory max). It could've been a lot slower than it currently is. But I'm not exactly proud of myself for doing that. But hey it works!

GOD why am I CONTINUALLY RESUBSCRIBED to garbo random newsletters!

we need to start a new internet altogether

and I know what's happening, these idiotic "tech influencers" pay some shady service to "bOosT YoUr FoLloWiNg bY 100X!!!" and they're blatantly just breaking the law, breaking GDPR, etc. etc., its bots all the way down, cant wait for clowns with 2 braincells to use a chatGPT integration with the web, content will just get SO much better fuck

*Applies to 60+ jobs*

All I get is more spam in my email inbox.

The job market is FUCKED right now

Listen, i really understand you want to know how much a certain resource is downloaded/viewed and so on. But what gets on my nerves is to sign up my email address every fucking time i want to see your semi-tech-but-actually-selling-you-a-pile-of-sperm-fermented-shit whitepaper . yes i know there is something called disposable email adresses and such... But if stuff is 'free' as you say you have, then make it available free!

Every time i think 'hey, this is actually relevant to my interests, let me read up more on that...' i hit the fucking 'insert your email for a free download'

Fuck off! Put your fucking form in the pits of hell and seal it in a fucking fucking dome next to fucking research subject akira with 99 fucking layers of fucking nuclear blast proof wall domes! I dont want you to fucking send me your fucking spam mails about every ideafart your sales dept has fired becausz they were high on computer cleaner spray tubes and thought 'let's trick those stupid people into our marketing scheme', go and fucking jump into a barrel of highly concentrated radioactive waste!

The only thing you manage to do for me like that is to fucking close the tab i had a slight interest in and never look back again!

Am i the only one getting angry about this?

This email spam I got is… different.

You may not like GDPR but it will change one important thing - american companies will stop email spam. Srsly, in Europe you always had to check box that you want marketing spam. USA companies always worked in opt-out mode, which is soooo annoying

FUCK SPAM !
If you are like me and register to many services online and get spammed with spam (duh) and want to know which services is selling your data , you can register with an email like this :
let's say your email is johndoe@gmail.com
and want to register to Service you can put johndoe+service@gmail.com and mails will still reach johndoe@gmail.com but appear as To : johndoe+service@gmail.com so then you can rant about how Service is selling your data.
credits to reddit.

Fucking EA Games and their fucking shit mailing system!!
All the sudden they start spamming me emails about their shit games nobody fucking cares about. I proceed to inspect the footer to find an 'unsubscribe' link and there was none, just a 'manage my preferences' link.
So I went there. After waiting a whole minute for a simple page to load (wtf) there is a checkbox saying 'yes please spam my inbox with EA's latest news about their shit games nobody cares about' and it was UNCHECKED.
So I leave it unchecked and click update (thinking it might actually unsubscribe me from this crap) BUT NO! I receive another email saying 'thank you, you stupid moron you just subscribed to our shit and will now receive even more of our useless email about how different the new NFS is and how rubbish the new Star wars game is...
FUCK

bruuuuuuuuuh I got an email asking for tech LatinX people to join for a talk on our problems facing x shit in tech.

As a Mexican American (I am more American than Mexican, but whatever) and your standard gun tootin Texan: fuck you, do not call me LatinX

I know both English and Spanish (and other languages that won't disclose here because fk u) well and believe that adding such buuuuuuuullshit to my beautiful Spanish is utter nonsense.

I sent it to the network admin and ask him to block them fuckers from ever sending emails my way ever again as spam.

LatinX....what a fucking joke

god damn it No-IP, I've opted out of these email lists 10 fucking times already. this shit is so annoying.

So I still have my very first email account, a hotmail account as a secondary, kinda spam account.

i signed up around 2000 i guess.

someone tried to get in, i got loads of mails of failed login attempts so i wanned to go and change my pw. But because of that bastard i cant login with just pw anymore, i need my phone. THAT ACCOUNT IS 20 FUCKING YEARS OLD. I never even provided a phone.
spent the last 20 minutes providing personal details to microsoft which are probably not the ones i used for signing up anyway.

you know how careful we were whem signing up for something online back them? I probably signed up as Thomas anderson from zion...

anyway, done now and bow it will take 24h for them to review it..

all of this only to reset my forgotten pw for my epic games account for with i signed up with that mail..,

holy guacamole.. I should start to trust password managers...

Client:' I think that one email account is sending some spam emails. Can you make some checks?'
Server:'Queued emails:730511...please kill me'

Did, uh... this guy fuck up his spambot or...?

I absolutely hate it when companies use this or that medium for communications despite me asking them time and time again for another.

I have a mail server for more professional communications. The phone, only for stuff that won't matter if I inevitably end up forgetting about it (even more so now that Google made call recording more or less impossible, laws be damned). I will forget about a phone call no doubt. I've got better shit to do than to remember your manglement decisions, thank you very much. On mail, that's all nicely on my mail server for retrieval in several years even.

So I ask them to use the email address I gave them, a dedicated one for their company too (catch-all go brrr). Can't do that with phone numbers. Managing all those SIM cards aside, our government has now limited the amount of SIM cards one can have to 10. And texts and phone calls are not a long-term medium! And I can't share my phone number with just about anyone because people will inevitably spam the shit out of it, AND it's hard to replace! It's not a good medium! So with all due respect, companies - I couldn't care less what medium you prefer to use for your customers. You don't care about what your customer wants you to use - explicitly so! - and you lose a customer. It's as simple as that. Dealing with manglement is one thing, but dealing with manglement using the wrong media is something I'd really rather not do.

But hey I guess that virtue signalling is more "in" than actually listening to your goddamn customers nowadays? Let's replace another master/slave reference. You know, arguing that if we did that 2 years ago, George Floyd would've totally survived. Not by fixing the US police brutality, oh no no no. That's not the right way. Changing nomenclature and hashtags however, and not giving half a shit about your customers, yeah that's the way to go!

Anybody here know that shitty service called Birthday Reminder? Yeah? Fuck them.

Never signed up for the bullshit, but because some kiddo's I was in class with 10+ years ago (I think it started when i was ~12 yrs old) did, I keep on getting their spam. They have an unsubscribe button in their emails, directing me to a page that says I can only unsubscribe if I log in.
FUCK YOU.
I NEVER SIGNED UP FOR YOUR SHITTY SERVICE AND I REALLY DONT WANT TO DO NOW EITHER.

Ofc I emailed them politely to remove both my email addresses from their databases.
And they are politely ignoring me.
Fuck you.

PS yes I know I can mark them as spam, but I prefer just not receiving their shit at all. I have a very clean spam folder.

Just received this really weird email. Probably spam, but why even bother when there is no link or attachment? Maybe it is encrypted... 🤔 What do you think? Anyways, the server has SSH enabled anyone care to bruteforce? :^)

This phising email I just received in my yahoo account almost got me fooled with the very convincing email design, but thankfully the culprit didn't smart enough to spoof his email address.
Ohh and they attach a suspicious pdf file too despite the message didn't say anything about attachment.
Apparently the spam detector in yahoo is not very good as this one was received in my main inbox.

All results for GDPR on my "spam mail adress" (NO results for DSGVO!) ... seems like GDPR doesnt apply for spam :D but this email is also registered to sooo many services and websites... i think the search is broken :|

guide to make successful software house company for future me:

1.find shortest domain name with code / star / best / it / super / ai / - whatever banger word you find
2. parse companies work board / linkedin jobs
3. parse people profiles
4. setup email server and create fake linkedin profiles that match jobs and candidates so company looks big
5. fake c-level management so company looks big
6. spam likes and create posts generated by ai from multiple profiles
7. spam invitations to people that match job descriptions and to people working within companies posting jobs
8. offer fake candidates that match job description
9. find real but less promising candidates and offer them the job
10. tell that fake candidate is no longer available but you have someone better

success

wait,
if there are 3.4 Billions FaceBook fake users, that means than there are also at least 3.4 Billions fake email accounts around. Jeez.

And the spam traffic estimates are at 260Billions email per day or 260B/3.4B=76 emails sent by each fake email accounts per day. Much less as probably fake email accounts are more.

So, only 76 spam emails sent per account per day. I think there is still room for a big improvement

Can we PLEASE once and for all redesign email and texting to be whitelist only?

Seriously, blacklisting doesn't work. We still have assholes that just because they know a line of text or a phone number can harass you forever. It IS harassment and needs to stop. We can always have the option of throw away blacklist addresses, but lets make primary email and phone numbers whitelist only as a standard feature. The business of SPAM would be dead overnight.

that's a devrant start, your confirmation email landed as spam on my inbox :P #devrant support

These goddamn fuckers who every week spam people because their CI or code is broken. Apparently it's more important than other projects. Douchenuggets send an email and CCs the whole department and all the bosses and basically says "It's all broken, the whole company needs to work on this asap, it's possibly x other person's fault".

Then when you try to troubleshoot it because bosses want it fixed, the dumb pieces of fuck made a bug in their code that they could have easily fixed if they took the time to troubleshoot themselves instead of panicking like jackasses. Or better, have good tests and actual error handling.

I swear some day I am gonna get into a fistfight I started because of this bullshit.

There is a pretty popular job search site I have used for quite some time. I wanted to close my account due to spam phone calls and emails. The website has no ui for closing your account. I fly into a fit of rage and change my email address to 20 random characters @gmail.com. Now I still have an account there but can't log in. Still getting the spam.

So I went through the ardous process of installing devRant, ignored all the onboarding, liked the content and registered an account. This community seems so liberating I wasn't even annoyed enough to immediately mark the "welcome" email as spam.

Again got an email(pseudospam) from a service I subscribed to (yes I did). It says the email is from CEO and it's supposed to be X-mas wish + invitation to their youtube channel. It was, kind of...

But the words they (or he, but I hope not) used in the email! It was so obviously blank, such uninteresting-president-speech. It was even targeted as a spam by gmail. In a foreign lang.

I mean... if you want to reach to your customers, sit on your ass and imagine _yourself_ reading an email that's long, its point was lost somewhere in the fourth sentence and magically appeared at the end + even default mail filter targets it as a spam.

That's what you get from a service. Motivational crap and blank words. Many thanks, I haven't heard a lot of those lately, eh?!

Ok... I thought I've seen every kind of shitty way to unsubscribe from a newsletter, but this one beats them all... I have to write a fucking email with a request not to receive emails...

There is a fucking useless law for cookies, why there isn't a law that force companies to put a one-click link to unsubscribe on emails?

Used own fake/spam mail to sign up here... (real address I kept for several years)

Wants to get stickers but need to send them real name and address with this email account..

Well fuck :~

I wonder what would happen if I replied to recruiters that spam my email with generic irrelevant roles with this:

Thank you for spamming. Your address has now been forwarded to a spambot.

I'm a bit too busy for it, but if someone wants to make an auto spam down vote bot that uses three accounts to downvote spam automatically, I can make three e-mailadresses for you that you can use to create devrant accounts for the bots. Such bot would be very appreciated. Also, for AI enthousiasts - AI can recognize this with a 3b model probably.

But even a few keyword matching instead of AI is probably enough. Let's ban the word crypto in lower and uppercase. Case of the camel even and don't forget the snake. (Sorry dottii :P)

I fucking despise making whatever website that needs to send emails.
The final user won't probably receive the emails bc of spam, the customer wont like this and blame me or the company I work for, but never actually PAY for an email service to send emails.

And almost nothing works with the old-ass domains here in Italy, but people will still use those old-as-fuck emails just because they can't make a new one on gmail or outlook.

Dafuq? Small people at creatorkit couldn't track me opening their spam and are now RESENDING it because my mac didn't load their spyware trackers in their first email? What even is this?
By the way, this email is about how they're gonna remove the free plan soon & their manipulative gaslighting justifications for that.

Microsoft, please stop the incomprehensible work vs. school account stuff and if you want to mail me a login code, then please actually do send an email. What's wrong with Microsoft Teams and office always giving its users headaches already when trying to log in?

A customer sent me a "FindTime" link, something like Calendso / Calendly, but "powered" by Microsoft Office. Seems that their power is off again, like ever so often. Microsoft: "can't access your account: You can't sign in here with a personal account. Use your work or school account instead."

Okay, go to bing, and search your error message. Try to use bing page to log in to my account: Microsoft: "We emailed a code." (No you didn't. At least I never received anything. And, yes, I did check my spam folder!) Microsoft: "Other ways to sign in: use Microsoft Authenticator".

me: "dear customer, please feel free to pick any time and date that matches your preference, as the FindTime link has been impossible to use".

How can Microsoft make me feel so dumb again, after more than 20 years as a developer? Have they ever heard about usability?

Dear Gmail, you guys always claim to be the "best" free email provider, yet each week my inbox gets filled with spammy emails, even after marking those emails as spam for the past 1 year. I'm tired of your bullshits. Fucking fix it already!

Me: This spam email looks a little weirder than normal.
Phishing team: Its just spam don't waste our time.

*15 min later*

Phishing team: Nevermind. Its trying to take your log in info off your account. Thanks

...Jerks

Another day, another 14 job applications that have been ignored.

Except one. I got an email back from one, but it was some spam filter system notifying me my address is now unable to send them emails.

Why exactly would you send an email to inform the sender they've been blocked???

Sometimes I respond to spam email with a fake account because I'm that bored.

I have a really sad life

TLDR
Apparently if you delete your google account as an only admin of a workplace by just clicking remove account on expired subscription screen when you are on document page you not only loose access to google workplace but also you can create new workplace google account using same domain and email immediately and it’s fresh google domain account without domain verification and with everything wiped off from your old account. So you don’t have access to anything but on the other side there is possibility to use gmail as spam hub if google fucked ip something in their dns verification and once verified and after that expired domain gets bought again it stays verified.

Well I luckily migrated my gmail to other provider 3 years ago and I lost nothing important there but lol.

You can easily lock out yourself from your domain.

I opened ticket using some questionnaire and by adding another dns txt record to my domain to claim access to workplace admin page and let’s see what they do.

If they ever respond to that ticket and how long it will take to get it resolved.

This is good test to see if google is still a people’s company or an evil corporation.

I was using workplace as long as it was free from days of google app engine and begging of cloud revolution. I remember at best times I could chat with google support employee about spam I got from domain registered on google servers and he was processing ticket for me.

I post that im hiring. Devs send me their resume to hire them. I ghost them. They spam me to answer. I say its all looking good but ghost them. They email me with their resumes. I still ghost them.

Feels good experiencing this from the other side for once. Vengeance is refreshing

Services with newsletters, you need this "unsubscribe" button to be clearly set, since "report spam" is 2 seconds faster to find. And the last email you send confirming that i unsubscribed may assure that i will report you as spam.

I'm dreading having spam on whatsapp when i go back to work. i wish people would just use email like sensible human beings

Does anybody else find themselves resubscribed to email lists that they've unsubscribed from before? Seems like the only true permanent solution is to delete your account on these sites entirely. I think I'm losing my mind...

It's lovely when your corporate application starts having problems sending mail through google, so you fallback to your onsite mail server, only to learn it is nothing more than a pass through to your gmail account.
Not only that, but it isn't secured at all, so spam bots have been sending millions of spam emails through it, leading to your google account being blacklisted which caused the email problems in the first place. Yay!

When you get that spam email...

What's up with recruiters calling the office? Today, a coworker got a call from a recruiter. 5 minutes later I got a call from a lady from an IT Management consulting company asking me if I'm the right person to talk to which I'm quite obviously not (she apparently sent me an email last week, which, if I got it, marked as spam).
In my last job several recruiters called; how could I even talk open on the phone -.-

Do marketing teams are really so retarded to believe that if you spam your new customer's mailbox twice a day with "we missed you", "take a look at our new products" etc etc email/newsletter bullshit it will actually entice them to buy more stuff? Bro, it just makes everyone dislike you, makes you look desperate and it's just straight-up annoying. Unsubscribe and no longer bothered to buy anything from you.

That lovely moment, when I have to spend an hour on mail delivery issue, only to find out the message was flagged as spam due to a faulty dns blacklist.

Though the way it got flagged is idiotic and funny at the same time, too.

The blacklist domain got parked, dunno why, and of course, all of the dns queries thus got redirected to a different dns server that just returned the A records of the dns park owners.

Guess what that causes when you use that blacklist? Every single email gets flagged, including that one of ours that I had to debug.

Fml, an hour of overtime for a stupid malfunctioning blacklist...

Hey guys, I have almost developed the backend of an app like reddit. My question is about authentication. How should I authenticate my user. Is phone number necessary to add phone otp?Because I don't want to get any legal trouble if someone posts objectionable content on the platform. Most of the apps today need phone number, I dont know why except reducing spam accounts.

Or shall I verify email by otp. But its hard to track disposable emails. I cant go for only gmail too as its banned in china. Email domains of china are weird.

Can I get into legal trouble for objectionable content posted by any evil user?

I dont want to go for auth.

I needed to send feedback through email, so I use thunderbird as my default email client, and as soon as I hit the send button, the message failed to send, where then I’m prompted to login to my gmail account on my computer.

Hey google, go fuck yourself. Gmail on computer is a fucking piece of trash. If you had not shut down inbox just yet, then I would use that. Gmail takes like over 40 seconds to load on my computer, which is why I use thunderbird because of that. I refuse to use your horrible piece of trash website and now you want me to login again. Seriously just fuck you.

Also, I’ve been getting Chinese spam in my main inbox rather than in the spam folder ever since this COVID/coronavirus shit started. Know any better choices? I would like something that is free, as long as they don’t have an affiliation and/or partnership with google.

Want to send an email? Sure thing, how about you configure first a DKIM, DMARC, SPF and some reverse DNS. Otherwise your mail can go fuck itself, because it won't even make it to the spam folder. Even if you do all these time consuming fuckwit tasks I might just mark your mail as spam. Because fuck you, that's why.

Sending mail to Gmail in a nutshell.

Have your ever tried to reply the spam message just for fun? I tried this with my legit email address now again they won. Fwak them.

Fuck spam, email harvesters and fuck moderators too.

I got tired of getting spam in my email inbox from an email address that I published on my website.

The bots and email harvesters were scraping / harvesting my email address from my website and sending me tons of unwanted spam.

I decided to create a free tool to protect peoples email address behind a form captcha so that it knows the person reading it, is indeed human and not a bot or spammer.

Decided to post to reddit to get the word out and the post gets flagged. Really? What gives?

Its a free tool to stop spam for chrikes sake. I am not trying to make money.

Anyhoo wiill post the link here. Hope you guys and gaals are more friendly and will share the link.

the link is Veilmail.io ( can someone post the link please)

RANT OVER

So I've sent emails to a couple of people (some of which I found on devRant) that were offering work. Typed a small story about myself and why I'd love to take the work.

No reply whatsoever.

Like, I get it if you don't want me, completely understand that, but how hard is it to let me know that.
Like c'mon guys, don't be a dick.

Disclaimers: I got the email address right, they did not land in my spam or whatever since I did receive an email from them in an earlier part of the correspondence. I did give them (what is in my opinion) a reasonable time to respond. They also didn't die or something since they are still active here...

I have created a "Spam Email Detection using Machine Learning" Project.

Do check out and let me know if any suggestions.

The project is uploaded on "myblindbird" website. Visit myblindbird and search "spam email detection" it will land you on the article.

Thanks

Hello anyone with an idea how I can unsubscribe my email from many services at once? It seems Google doesn't have that feature that lets you see all your email subscriptions. I'm receiving a lot of junk and spam mails from some subscriptions I no longer want.
Unroll.me would have been great but it's not available in my country.