Lessons in Spam
Well, it had to happen. I’ve been spending time fixing spam issues on some of my little websites and have also ran into an email spam problem.
First of all, the website issues. From the turn of the year I noticed a large spike in comment spam hitting ballardcornerspark.org. This isn’t really that surprising – its a public website, we broadcast the address, and the @ballardcornerspark.org email addresses get hosed all the time. I cranked out google and found a couple of nice plugins for Wordpress 2 that I installed and the problem disappeared (so far!). Basically a simple math question to post a comment and also a tool to close old posts from comments.
And then a few days ago, bluefacedpixie started to get hit too (mostly from one bad IP address that I could block) at least 2 comments an hour. The cutting edge of fame – my Ridgid post was spotlighted at Signal vs. Noise which probably led robots to find the bfp blog – my own little version of being slashdotted (and my bandwidth use did jump too…). I started to get repetitive strain injury with the whole “mark all as spam” comment moderation so tonight added a couple of additions along the same lines to bluefacedpixie. The same Math Comment Spam Plugin as used on ballardcornerspark, but I used a simpler Comment Shutoff because this blog is older with a more hacked installation of Wordpress (note to self: someday take the time to upgrade to Wordpress 2).
I’ll let you know how they do – by the time I finish this post I will have missed a few timeslots for new spam to arrive.
If successful then I suppose the rest of the family (planetdanika, premodernist and Ringraziamento) will all need the same treatment.
And now we get to the sad tale of my email address and other people’s computers. A few weeks ago I sent out Lucy’s birth announcement to what we could conservatively call half the English-speaking world. Mostly using email addresses provided by D. As D was busy that day I sent out the email: to self, bcc known universe, from me. Ooops.
Since that day I’ve been getting hit by email spam much more than normal: Spam Assassin is failing at my host provider, Apple Mail’s pretty-crappy Junk filter fails to catch them and my carefully crafted “smack it dead unless it’s sent to me” filter also fails. Mostly stock market spam, very well done most of it too. My only assumption is that some of the recipients of the birth email are hacked/spambotted/virused and my very visible “from” email address is now on more spammers sell lists that previously. Bugger. I should have used a more temporary email address, but we so wanted those replies.
If you received the Lucy announcement and read this blog, and people you email complain about all the spam they get – you might want to run a little “clean my computer” magic on the old Windows box.
No spam so far, I’m going to bed.
