A simple hint for email administrators everywhere. If you have a large number of users with unique sequential ID numbers, it may be tempting to use that ID as a primary email address, or an alias, but don’t do it. It’s an open invitation to spammers to target your users with the minimum [...]

Right now, there’s limited information on reputable news sites regarding the earthquake/tsunami that occurred south of Samoa yesterday. To find more, I turned to Twitter (and its open source equivalent identi.ca). Disseminating live news from witnesses, moments after a major event, is the most compelling feature of such services, but both failed me. [...]

Something’s broken on the database that runs this site, specifically there’s b0rkage in the comment table, and the ssh daemon is not reachable. Perhaps it’s to do with the larger than normal amount of spam that’s been arriving today (for “larger than normal” read: one metric truckload). More info later after I’ve had [...]

I’m in the process of rewriting the Worst Offenders plugin for the soon-to-be-released WordPress 2.5. Before I make a tested and polished version of the code globally available, I’d be interested to hear from anyone who’d like to alpha test it.
As before Worst Offenders works cooperatively with other anti-spam plugins: its primary purpose [...]

It’s only 15 months since I mentioned the rocket-like acceleration of Akismet which went from a standing start to the point where it had fended off a million spam messages for its users in just 4 months. If things had continued at that pace it would have squashed a cool 5 million spams by [...]

My spam counter in Akismet has been steadily rising of late, and it’s been approaching 10,000 caught spams very quickly. Yesterday it went through 9,950 and with my average of over 100 spams per day it should have gone through the 10,000 barrier by now. But instead I’ve had about 3 spams today. [...]

This last few weeks the site has been very heavily hit by comment spammers hawking their usual reprobate websites and wasting internet bandwidth. Akismet has been doing a sterling job of catching this spam and not one message has made it onto the site (I wrote about Akismet’s effectiveness in the pre-launch testing previously). [...]

I’m hoping to spend some time over the next ‘n’ weeks understanding the data generated from the mynicemailat domain, though I’m a bit busy with real experiments at the moment, so I intend to do it by thinking aloud here as I get the opportunity.

This website – like any website that allows readers to submit comments – receives comment-spam, usually advertising medicines, gambling, or other vices.
I’ve been trialling a new anti-comment-spam plugin since mid September. It’s called Kismet, it’s from Automattic, (hence Akismet for short) and it’s working very well.

Hopefully I just spoiled a spammer’s whole week. How? I bought the domain that he’s trying to promote (MyNiceMailAt.com) before he did.