Author here. I quickly thought of the title for the article and shipped it. I agree it's clickbait-y and apologize to SendGrid (and any confused readers) but yes, as you say it's _technically_ correct in a very narrow sense – SendGrid's infrastructure and users are sending these emails, it's just that they're fraudulently associated with SendGrid the company.

In any case, I revised the title to "SendGrid isn’t emailing you about ICE or BLM. It’s a phishing attack."

Maybe someone can edit the title of the submission on HN accordingly?

I think HN should embrace AI to the point of having an alternative AI-generated title next to the original title, to reduce clickbait and reduce the global rage index.

Maybe one day our knee jerk reactionary outrage will be quelled not by any enlightenment but because we are forced to grow weary of falling prey to phishing attacks.

I'd feel pretty stupid getting worked up about something only to realize that getting worked up about it was used against me.

I'm writing this because for a moment I did get worked up and then had the slow realization it was a phishing attack, slightly before the article got to the point.

Anyways, I think the clickbait is kindof appropriate here because it rather poignantly captures what is going on.

So a completely irresponsible headline. Is the writer confused or do we think they were aware of this distinction?

Also they are using variants of the same scam to target a variety of groups

Rather ironic to complain about phishing attempts with clickbait (which, I largely think of as phishing's kid brother).

I seriously hope HN discourse has the bare minimum of “open the link and read it before commenting”.

Yeah I noticed the same thing with other providers. Especially with ones that provide free trials.

The title is genius; it uses the same psychological trick as the phishers are, to point out to us how vulnerable we are. Obviously, for you to know the title is clickbait, you'd've had to click through and read it, which is the exact social engineering vulnerability the author is trying to demonstrate being exploited.

I thank the author for getting me this way, as I would have likely fallen for the unsubscribe trick.

right, so on the topic of "phishing emails designed to elicit enough emotion that you forget to consider the button might be a phish", the headline itself of this blog post is doing the exact same thing, really. The headline should be, "Phishing scams launched through SendGrid exploit deep political sentiments to achieve success" or something like that.

but that would be clear and very boring. nobody would read your blog then. A headline that very obviously implies Sendgrid the company supports ICE, and so much so that they are emailing all their customers about it, clicks galore. Well done.

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