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Ask HN: How would you detect if a website is doing email marketing?

by malditojavi on 9/22/15, 7:33 PM with 5 comments

I'm trying to find a way to determine if a website is doing email marketing to its audience.

Parsing the index of the website and looking for a form where they ask about an email to subscribe to, can be a way of knowing they might have an audience via email. Any other ideas?

  • by bwh2 on 9/23/15, 12:41 AM

    Visit the documentation for MailChimp, Constant Contact, etc. They all have recommended implementation patterns, usually HTML or JS snippets. Parse webpages looking for pieces of those snippets.

    Do the same with the most common WordPress plugins for those platforms.

  • by MalcolmDiggs on 9/25/15, 2:26 PM

    You might have some luck grabbing their DNS records, look for TXT records with the string "spf" in them. If they're a big sender of email, they've likely needed to add SPF records (referencing their transactional email service of choice) to their DNS, in order for their emails to avoid the spambox.

  • by cdvonstinkpot on 9/22/15, 7:46 PM

    The big companies might be on one of these occasionally, or not so occasionally.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_reporting

  • by notvladputin on 9/22/15, 8:49 PM

    If the subscribe / unsubscribe pages are in the google index, or discoverable, you could crawl those and look for company names and domains on that page, match them up against your db.

  • by jjoe on 9/25/15, 9:40 AM

    Subscribe with a throwaway email address and monitor it for a month or two.