theBartels.de » spam

Spam, Spam, Spam

CB — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 22:19:41 +0000

Unbelievable…just noticed, that the anti-spam plugin of my blog (Akismet) filtered 25,002 spam comments in the last 2 years. That are more than 34 spam comments per day.

After that number got my attention, I checked my mail account. After the switch around a month ago from my own mail server to Google Apps for you Domain, which now lets me use Google’s Gmail infrastructure for my primary mail adress (first name (at) this domain), I received over 5000 spam mails. Fortunately, only 3 spam messages were not recognized by Gmail’s spam filter and I had no false-positives. (Which is very impressive)

On my own mailserver, I had collected spam mails for some time to train the spam filter software. Around 10,000 spam mails had the size of 65 megabytes. That means, that getting right now 5000 spam mails per month (approximately), I get currently around 60,000 spam mails per year which have a total size of 400 megabytes.

If you are interested in the topic spam, Wikipedia has a good article as a starting point.

Anti-Spam-Rename is doing its job

CB — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 07:04:14 +0000

I have been running Anti-Spam-Rename for the last 6 days now and it seems, that it does a really good job. I still get some spam (54 spam comments in that timeframe), but compared to over 100 spam comments per day before, it is a reduction of over 1111%.

So, if anyone was fearless enough to test the plugin, it would be great, if you would comment on it.

Anti-Spam-Rename – My first WordPress plugin

CB — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 12:46:26 +0000

In the last weeks the amount of comment and trackback spam in my blog significantly increased from just a few to over 100 entries per day. Although Akismet does a very good job, sometimes there are false-positives so that you have to go reguarly through the list of marked spam to filter these.
On discobeats.de I read about an easy way to prevent spam. As the described method of manually renaming and updating certain files of your wordpress installation, is annoying after some time, I created a WordPress plugin.

Although it is still a feature-incomplete version, perhaps anyone likes to try it (on his/her own risk ):
WordPress Plugin: Anti-Spam-Rename