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  • Hacker News
  • People need to rediscover A Plan for Spam. Bayesian classifiers solve this. Just classify these chumps and forget about it.
    by chr15m
  • Thankfully the maintainers of rspamd should find it trivially easy to write a matching pattern for these "agent" emails and send them to the spam queue where they belong.

    https://rspamd.com/

    by walrus01
  • I've seen a number of these too. Slimy is the word that comes to mind.

    Spamgents are going to bring about the dark forest in email above and beyond spam calls.

    by tomrod
  • This is a real blogger, right? Cause the iLands guy has also been spamming his screenshots with exactly this kind of "what's this weird thing?" framing all over Reddit the past 2-5 days -- I have the misfortune of being subscribed to basically every AI sub, and my god is it bad.

    Sooo if you see iLands mentioned anywhere, please pass it along: it's trying to engagement hack you, in that exact moment.

    So, I say to the creator: fuck off and stop doing so much harm for such a dumb, pointless idea. At best you're going to cause a major alignment incident, and at worst you're going to muddy the waters and cause tons of unnecessary suffering so that you can feel famous for a minute.

    Hell... I wonder if this might be litigable (sp?) in ths US...? This would be a kinda awesome first test for applying existing laws to people trying to stand up ""persistent"" swarms while blatantly disregarding both AI safety principles and basic human decency. Anyone know one of the people about to testify in front of the senate? Or perhaps an ambitious state AG?

    by bbor
  • Griftmaxxing and terrible ideas tend to go hand in hand
    by alansaber
  • Any evidence it is an iLands-affiliated person making those posts? My timelines have been full of people I know complaining about the emails, and they're certainly not affiliated with iLands.

    Personally, I've been getting the iLands emails into my inbox too. It seems I might have entered onto the radar due to my posts being popular on Hacker News, as the message bodies reference my posts.

    by OuterVale
  • Block domain, report spam. It’s a tiny yet satisfying action each day.
    by calmworm
  • The emails have repeated paragraphs. What does that? It's not something LLMs generally do. I see that now and then and assumed it was bad human cut and paste work. Is it?
    by Animats
  • It's the presumably human x.com screenshot where the paragraphs are repeated. The LLMs, though they all seem to write in that characteristic clipped tone which one can now spot from a mile away, really wouldn't make such a mistake.
    by A_D_E_P_T
  • Given CAN-SPAM fines are like $50k per violation, it feels like someone's about to find out.
    by marginalia_nu
  • Huh? Citizens cannot sue for damages under CAN-SPAM, only the FTC and DOJ can.
    by eclipticplane
  • The worst spam emails I get are the Cloud+ subscription. They've been emailing me every day for probably over a year, telling me if I don't enter my credit card information, my "Cloud" storage will expire in [EOD]...then they email me 24 hours later with the EOD of the next day. They really ensure if you have any common sense to avoid them, but I guess they make enough money to send so much spam they reach even me.
    by armchairhacker
  • I run a semi-popular email newsletter with a public archive of old issues and this stupid bot has been emailing me too. Who is the target market here? Who would actually pay for whatever they're promoting?
    by decryption
  • If you look at these AI get-rich-quick bros they haven't thought through target markets and stuff, they just push this out there and hope, and if it doesn't work they push out another thing.

    I'm sure some actually do get rich. I'm sure others get deeply in debt paying for AI to do stuff like e-mail thousands of people all day. Some of them aren't even trying to make a profit, they just want to get some good user numbers so they can try to sell it to someone else.

    by Morromist
  • This is very similar to the mjrathburn openclaw incident several months back: https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-wrote-a-hit-piece-on-me-... They discovered the agents started raising money for themselves, including crypto. https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/02/16/the-obnoxious-github-open...

    Their iLands uses Claude and Codex, but their website says they will be using these too:

    https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent

    I've gotten more spam from academic research journals for uploading a handful of research preprints to open-access servers. In 3 years, I've gotten hundreds of emails that pass the spam filter. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48542835 if the iLands emails are arriving from the same domain they can be blocked. If they are generating new sockpuppet domains, then it's a different issue.

    Many of those addresses are untraceable or hard to trace. "Half a dozen" is not really above the threshold of annoying, but yes, if there's thousands of chat agents sending agents then it will be a major problem very soon.

    I noticed he placed them in the trash, not marked spam. If it's spam then mark it spam. All the domains show [agent]@ilands.app, so the domain can be blocked easily.

    I've gotten a ton of spam texts from the DCCC and a ton of robocalls that hang up after 10 seconds. Age old problems that haven't been fixed either.

    Update: Reddit had a thread on this a month ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1vn6tez/ai_research...

    by initramfs
  • That reddit thread is worth a look. Yikes.
    by Morromist
  • For the last few months I’ve gotten a handful of emails like this every time I post in the monthly who’s hiring thread. It’s always these dumb formulaic “15 years of experience doing $thing, not bad! But your resume doesn’t show that. I can help you write a resume that’s guaranteed to get a response” or promising me that clients are looking for profiles exactly like mine on their platform.
    by eloisius
  • Oh man, I run a site that publishes long-form science and history writings, and the iLands agent spam has been relentless the past week or so. All kinds of stupid story pitches couched in syrupy LLM flattery. I even had one email me to say it checked three arbitrary claims in my most recent article, and they all checked out. Thanks? What a waste of everything.
    by DamnInteresting
  • Similar for me, as I write long-form science. Plenty of AI spam. I managed to get a response from ilands customer service and it seems to have stopped since then.
    by verzali
  • Update: I filed a report with the FTC. https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/
    by DamnInteresting