Latest in email and comment spam

These days, a much bigger part of my day is spent on fixing the damage caused by spam. It isn’t that much of a hassle to remove the dozens of comment spams I get daily on this site, but it does take up valuable time. Even after my software nukes all URLs in the comments, it doesn’t take much for the spammers to post so the practice continues. I’ll simply add a few more measures to make it more painful for the spammers, but that’ll have to wait till I have time.

The real PITA is clearing the queue on the ISP’s mail server. The issue seems to be getting worse and worse by the day. It is quite normal to delete a couple of thousand spams during a single day and filtering only helps a little.

For a while, the biggest problem was rogue customers (ab)using the mail servers and spamming away or running open relays used to send out spam. Blocking all of their outgoing email was an effective way to reign in the culprits and stop the hideous practice, but then they shifted to temporary dialup accounts which made it impossible to detect and stop the spammers permanently. Some additional measures and a more vigilant watch on the mail has brought that under control as well, but now the focus has shifted to incoming spam.

The spammers and spam seem to be multiplying faster than we admins can fight them off and although we’re smarter (off course we are, somehow ;)), there are simply more of them around. They’re wealthier too.

This has now become a big enough issue for me to really concentrate on setting up a better email system which means I should get back to work. Wish me luck cos if I fail, I may just switch sides.