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Letter to Mr. Comment Spammer
Dear Mr. Bob@y####o.com,
Thanks for bombarding my site with spam comments in the last few days. Your ability to send 6-8 spam comments per hour to the multiple blogs that compose ai is very impressive. I would be in awe of your abilities, but for the fact that they are so pathetic. For now, deleting your comments and banning the IP addresses from which you send them is quite a little hassle for me. If your goal is to be a pain in my ass, you are succeeding. However, in the spirit of fairness I feel obliged to tell you that when MT 3.1 comes along with its new improved Blacklist, I will crush you.
Have a nice day,
-ambimb
Posted August 8, 2004 08:37 AM | meta-blogging
Ambimb:
Save yourself some trouble. MT-Blacklist will also quite nicely Blacklist an email address. Just enter the e-mail address (with the @-mark escaped as so, if you're feeling really professional: bob/@yahoo.com), and Mr. Bob will be a problem of the past.
Or is he sending the spam from different email addresses?
Posted by: A. Rickey at August 8, 2004 11:02 AM
Thanks for the tip. I would love to ban this guy, but yes, he sends every spam from a slightly different email address (the four numbers in the address always change) and most of them come from different IP addresses, as well. The bigger problem is that I'm running MT 3.0 and Blacklist doesn't work with it. MT 3.0 has pitiful spam management options because Six Apart was betting its spam management on TypeKey, which I don't use. (Does anyone?) That's why I'm so anxiously awaiting MT 3.1 -- it's going to ship w/the newest version of Blacklist and I'm betting that will dramatically improve automatic spam blocking as well as the tools available to get rid of any spam that does get through.
Posted by: ambimb at August 8, 2004 11:31 AM
I wonder if there is someway that you could use the statistical/content filters that are used for e-mail programs. You can check out this site for junkmatcher, a freeware program that I've used with great success with Apple Mail. I'm trying to get it to work with entourage with somewhat limited success so far.
Anyway, it has some great info and links to spam fighting resources that might be of some use.
Posted by: Famous P. at August 8, 2004 02:12 PM
Sorry, forgot to post the URL for junkmatcher http://junkmatcher.sourceforge.net/Home/index.html
Posted by: Famous P. at August 8, 2004 02:13 PM
Hey, have you checked out http://www.blogspam.org/ as well?
Posted by: Famous P. at August 8, 2004 02:32 PM
Yeah, some sort of pattern-matching thing would work well for comment spam, but that's basically what MT-Blacklist does. The new version should be out w/in a week or two, so I'll see if that helps. I haven't had any comment spam in 24 hours so maybe they're taking a bit of a break.
Posted by: ambimb at August 9, 2004 08:23 AM
Yeah, I've been getting the same guy, too. Mostly he advertises Texas Hold-Em.
I've been trying to figure out the Perl expression that will block bob@y????o.com, but for some reason I'm getting a creative block...
Posted by: A. Rickey at August 9, 2004 01:48 PM
