Ask HN: Do you get bots signing up random email addresses to your newsletter?

5 pointsby BSTRhino8 เดือนที่ผ่านมา4 comments

Hi HN,

Approximately 5-10 times a day I seem to have a bot that goes to my website and tries to sign up a random email address to my newsletter. Each time it happens, my server sends out a "confirm you want to subscribe" email and they never ever click to confirm. Many of the emails bounce as they are sent to non-existent email addresses. I don't understand what this is supposed to achieve, except for maybe ruining the reputation of my email service.

It's always coming from the same country (the Netherlands) but never the same IP.

I'm wondering if other people's websites/newsletters are experiencing the same?

4 comments

gumboshoes8 เดือนที่ผ่านมา

Might be a bot looking for a submit form to abuse that will post content to a forum. The HTML or CSS ID on an email field may look the same to a bot no matter the form. So it will submit what matches its goals even though the text body content field does not match.

BSTRhino8 เดือนที่ผ่านมา

Ah interesting theory, yep could be. A broken bot. Interestingly there is only an email address field and nothing else, so maybe it's failing to recognise that it's not a comment section/forum.

Interestingly it always visit the homepage, and within 1 second sign up to the newsletter, and then it does a random walk through about 5-10 pages (always different links) before stopping. So maybe it is looking for a forum or something.

arbol8 เดือนที่ผ่านมา

Do you use a newsletter signup plugin or is it hand-written?

BSTRhino8 เดือนที่ผ่านมา

It’s all my own code, interestingly. So the bot must be just searching for any email field and submitting to it, for some reason.

My latest update is I managed to block the bot by hiding the email sign up until the user scrolls the page. Turns out the bot doesn’t scroll. So no more random email signups anymore!