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Tell HN: Runops YC W21 scraped my email from Git and keeps spamming me

23 points by eloisius ↗ HN
Last month I got an unsolicited email from Runops founder @andriosr. After receiving a follow-up email, I asked him to stop. Unfortunately, the emails keep coming. This is unethical and annoying. I have no relationship with this company and they must have extracted my email from a repo on GitHub. I get that you're a scrappy startup trying to growth hack into some traction, but spam is just spam. It's not that big of a deal, but this is the kind of behavior I expect from a shady company. As a small tech startup hoping to serve technical customers, I expect you to be better. One spam I'll ignore, two, I'll ask you to stop. Continuing after that is worth calling you out within the community that we share.

    On August 01, 2022 07:58, Andrios Robert <andrios@t****s.com> wrote:

    Hi, saw you forked redis on Github and wanted to ask for a quick help.

    I'm the founder of an open-source core tool for managing access to k8s, aws, databases, and others. I'm trying to learn from DevOps leaders on how different companies are solving this problem.

    Who is the best person you know for me to talk about it?

    Andrios.
I forked redis a long time ago, but I have nothing to do with dev ops, so I ignored this poorly targeted networking email. Another one came four days later:

    On August 04, 2022 08:56, Andrios Robert <andrios@t****s.com> wrote:

    Hello, adding a bit more context: my name is Andrios, and I’m the founder of a fresh dev tool company backed by Y Combinator and Global Founders Capital. We help DevOps teams from high growth startups (EBANX, Dock) and public companies (Enjoei, RD Station) controlling prod and PII (sensitive data) access.

    It seems like you have these challenges, and I was hoping you’d be able to help us out by sharing your personal feedback and insights on security for k8s, aws, and other cloud tools. Even a quick 10-minute phone conversation while you’re on-the-go (walking your dog, or getting your morning coffee, whichever is easiest for you..), would be much appreciated. Please let me know if possible to arrange, I’ll adjust according to your availability.
After this email I replied, asking Andrios to stop.

    Do not ever email me again.
They stopped for a couple weeks, but have since kept coming:

    On August 22, 2022 08:47, Andrios Robert <andrios@t****s.com> wrote:

    Thought to share this Reddit thread where multiple companies talk about how they manage ad-hoc access to production databases:

    https://www.reddit.com/r/rails/comments/n6zigp/do_you_access_the_rails_console_in_production/


    On 9/7/22 22:26, Andrios Robert wrote:

    Hi, last ping on this.

    It would help us a loooot if you could provide some insights as to how you deal with ad-hoc production access today:

    Feel free to reply just with a number:

        This is an urgent problem but we don't have time to work on it now.
        This is a low priority problem for us at the moment.
        We built an in-house solution to solve this.
        This isn't a problem.

    Thanks a lot!

19 comments

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verdverm
Why don't you just use your email provider's spam & block capabilities?

You should also consider the email you use with git to be public.

eloisius
I do mark all unsolicited marketing emails as spam, and I do consider my email to be public. In fact I welcome unsolicited emails from people that want to network, ask me questions, or anything else. This isn’t that. This is a vaguely personalized marketing email sent through SendGrid. I expect he probably scraped me, and put me into some marketing automation tool and is running me through a program.
verdverm
Are you just venting here?
rco8786
A little public shaming never hurt.
[dead] verdverm
eloisius
> false accusations

Not the same thing as public shaming for provable bad behavior.

verdverm
what proof do we have beyond your claims here?
bdcravens
No, it seems like they are calling out repeated abuse by a YC company. From what I can see, it's unlikely these are false accusations as your down-thread reply implies.
verdverm
how is this "abuse" and not the same as any other company using your email for marketing?
eloisius
If those other companies don't have a prior business relationship with you, then they are also committing abuse. In fact, it has been illegal in the US for almost 20 years [1], even if it is difficult to enforce.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN-SPAM_Act_of_2003

verdverm
> The CAN-SPAM Act is occasionally referred to by critics as the "You-Can-Spam" Act because the bill fails to prohibit many types of e-mail spam and preempts some state laws that would otherwise have provided victims with practical means of redress. In particular, it does not require e-mailers to get permission before they send marketing messages.

Maybe read the sources you try to use to back up your flawed argument?

eloisius
> A visible and operable unsubscribe mechanism is present in all emails.

> Consumer opt-out requests are honored within 10 business days.

They didn't include an unsubscribe, and if we take my plain English request to stop sending me emails as an opt-out request, then they also failed to honor my request within 10 days. However, my point isn't to say I have a legal case against Runops for spamming me. Just that their founder is behaving unethically by sending me unsolicited emails (even after I asked him to stop) about his company for no reason other than that I have worked on open source software before. So far, your arguments have been

- Why don't you (and however many thousands of other people he spammed) just block him?

- This is a false accusation, e.i. there's no reason to believe you received these emails

- It's not spam anyway

I have to wonder. Do you scrape developers' emails out of GitHub and send them marketing emails to promote your startup?

bdcravens
The first email was marketing. After you ask to be removed, it's abuse.

> After this email I replied, asking Andrios to stop. > Do not ever email me again.

jhloa2
I haven’t worked at sendgrid in years but when I was there they took spam reports very seriously and even a few reports would negatively affect the senders reputation.