Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Hello everyone. I am the founder of Mailscarp.

Mailscarp is an email platform that has been opened in BETA version recently and has been tested for a while with a few of our members.

We apologize for the inconvenience caused by spam emails sent by a member of our Mailscarp project.

The account of this member, the newsletters he owns and the subscriber emails he has uploaded to his account have been deleted immediately, and necessary measures have been taken to prevent this member from creating a newsletter again. You can be sure that we will do everything in our power to avoid such a problem again in the future.

Mailscarp is already a project designed to protect you from spam emails. It was developed for this purpose, and we are very sorry to be accused for this reason. I hope you will accept our apologies for this matter and try to give Mailscarp a chance to protect you from spam in the future.

Thank you!



>sent by a member of our Mailscarp project.

With a history of 'surprises' like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24255179

Also, the only developer listed at devro labs: https://github.com/kesarawimal (bunch of email scraper repos in there too)

Also, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24158498 (lol)


Also, their HN submission history [1] is fascinating: exclusively Github repositories, all submitted exactly on the hour (± a few seconds)!

I wonder if they are running a scraper that automatically cross-posts trending repos...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=maydemir


This user and his ghost account “screpy” talk to each other on HN if you look at the comments. Very suspicious considering this behavior of also posting and then commenting and acting. How do we know OP’s comment about Mailscarp now isn’t also fake? The user’s reputation is not very strong


Bing being Bing (via DuckDuckGo), when I searched for mailscarp I got mailscrap.com. Which is basically a diametrically opposed service.

> With Mailscarp, you can subscribe to newsletters with a separate email address, so your personal inbox stays clean.

> MailScrap: this email verification tool actually connects to the mail server and checks whether the mailbox exists or not, wipeout disposable email addresses from your email list.


Same deal with Google, plus a bunch of ads for spammy tools.


If the project is intended to protect people from spam emails, shouldn't it follow best practices like an explicit opt-in?


Thanks for responding. Could you say who it is? Because unfortunately, a common response of corporate wrongdoers is to blame the problem on someone who has now definitely been taken care of.


And while I'm asking questions, jaquesm says, "the sender is mailscarp.com". Was it actually sent through your servers? It looks like mailscarp is only inbound, so I don't understand how one of your beta users could have spammed a bunch of people on your behalf.


Yes, it was, I checked the headers.


Thanks. Then maydemir's explanation doesn't hold up for me. The Mailscarp page doesn't say anything about the features he describes. It seems like the simpler explanation is that they just tried spamming people and got caught. I hope that's not the case, and I hope they'll respond to questions to straighten things out.


Hard to argue with these:

ARC-Authentication-Results: i=1; mx.google.com; dkim=pass header.i=@mailscarp.com header.s=api header.b=DnugwplP; spf=pass (google.com: domain of hackernews.newsletter@mailscarp.com designates 104.243.65.3 as permitted sender) smtp.mailfrom=hackernews.newsletter@mailscarp.com; dmarc=pass (p=QUARANTINE sp=QUARANTINE dis=NONE) header.from=mailscarp.com Return-Path: <hackernews.newsletter@mailscarp.com>


Just curious how they did this, your whole shtick is that you don’t send emails, and is read are a repository for newsletters and other spam… how does that translate to scraping emails addresses and sending newsletters to personal inboxes?


[flagged]


You're spamming this post, that complains about spam from your product.


Makes me wonder if this "member of their project" is just some made up scapegoat.


> You are one of these 88 people

This thread is getting enough attention that I'm highly doubtful this message was only sent to 88 people. I saw the email, thought "I haven't subscribed to any HN digests lately", and deleted it.


So TL;DR: you produce a mailing list software, and someone used it to spam 88 HN users


Protip: it would probably be a good idea to spin off the spam-sending service (you call this “Creator”) into a new company, separate from the anti-spam service (you call this “Inbox”). I would guess the two userbases (spammers vs spammees) have a fairly small intersection.


> and necessary measures have been taken to prevent this member from creating a newsletter again

leave the gun, take the cannoli




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: