Reminder.FYI
A weekly newsletter for forgotten responsibilities.
So I learned my lesson for always using captchas on forms.
I have a slack message that gets posted to me every time someone signs up for the newsletter, and it looks like this: "New reminder.fyi registration: ryder@example.com"
Saturday July 15th, I got a sign up from an email with a suspicious domain:
some_id_12345_reminder.fyi@data-backup-store.com
This email is suspicious both because of the domain, and the fact that it contained my domain within it, but I missed the notification in slack, so didn't think anything of it.
A few days later, I started getting a ton of signups that looked like real emails, flooding in very quickly:
After getting about 20 of these, I figured out through the logs the site was being targetted by bots. I took the site down temporarily and put up a captcha, but after re-launching was still faced with bot signups. Finally, I put the whole site behind Cloudflare and haven't had any problems since then.
What was happening?
My best guess is that a spammer was using my site (and likely others) to flood the inboxes of their targets. When signing up, users get a confirmation email. It's designed in such a way that the contents of the email are static (with the exception of the confirmation link) so there are no opportunities for a bad-actor to manipulate it, so my best guess is that the bad actor was registering users concurrently on my site and others to flood their inboxes (either to distract from an email they don't want the user to see, or to just be generally annoying?).
I'm not exactly sure why, but I do know that it's stopped, and I know never to trust those weird domain signups anymore.
Anyone have any thoughts on why all this happened?
Hello World - Reminder.FYI
I've been wanting to build this project for a long time now - since university actually. I originally came up with the idea as an app, and used it to apply to an entrepreneurship program, but never actually built it.
Now that it's been a while, I decided to take a weekend and finally build an MVP. This whole thing took me about 2 days total to get up and running - and I'm super excited to see if there are any other people just as forgetful with their responsibilities as me.
-
1
Hmm I wonder how it will do. My thought is you're sending personal details of your life to a website.
Still I don't know if recurring scheduled emailers are easily accessible to people (like how scheduled Gmail/android sms is a thing now).
-
1
Yeah I'm interested to know if others will respond to it as well!
Personal / private details are a big one for me too when using a product, so I tried to design it to collect as little information as necessary. The only details the site has about a person are the email, and the large categories of their interests - nothing specific. I put up a basic privacy policy too to try and outline that.
Still I don't know if recurring scheduled emailers are easily accessible to people
And this is a totally fair point. My original idea for this was an app, but I decided on email since I wanted a solution that was more of a gentle nudge than a "you must do this now".
-
1
I may have not understood how it captures the reminder things.
I thought people would write their reminder (stored on your side) then sent back to them at a future date. That's what I was referring to.
-
-
-
1
This is a very cool idea! How do you plan on personalizing the reminders?
-
1
So they're personalizable to a simple degree, by selecting the categories that interest you. I think my feature plans might include a "unsubscribe to this specific item" option as well so people don't get reminders about specific things that don't apply to them.
-
-
1
so completely didn't realize this article was viewable outside of the context of the project, otherwise probably wouldn't have called it "hey girl hey"
Comment