HN Explorer

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

5 points by BSTRhino ↗ HN
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?

3 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 19.6 ms ] thread
gumboshoes
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.
arbol
Do you use a newsletter signup plugin or is it hand-written?
BSTRhino
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!