Battle of the Bots with Mariska Calabrese, beehiiv & Jakub Alexa, Omnivery

Email feels free, but the economics are brutal: zero-cost sending makes abuse infinitely scalable.

In this episode, Jacqueline sits down with Mariska and Jakub to unpack the "bot layer" that's quietly wrecking modern email: security scanners, crawlers, and malicious automation that inflate clicks, poison dashboards, and trigger the wrong automations. They get specific about why bad actors iterate faster than platforms, why "heuristic guesswork" leads to painful false positives, and how beehiiv opted for radical transparency by showing verified clicks alongside raw data. The conversation also jumps channels: Jakub argues RCS could undercut SMS on price and become the next high-volume abuse playground.

This episode was recorded in October 2025. Any references to global events were included as illustrative context, not as commentary on current news.

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Timestamps

01:20 – Worst unsubscribe nightmares, Roman aqueducts, and unexpected heroes

05:40 – Why "free" email creates systemic abuse (and why volume hides the bad actors)

08:06 – How threat actors bypass trust indicators

11:02 – The reality check: protection isn't getting easier, it's getting more complicated

19:02 – Defining non-human interactions (NHI) and bot detection

24:12 – Bot detection: definitive data vs heuristics, and why false positives hurt more

26:20 – Elevating verified human engagement at Beehiiv

33:13 – RCS vs SMS: the pricing lever that could supercharge abuse

46:14 - Global privacy legislation and the future of trust

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