I ordered business cards a few weeks ago from VistaPrint.com. I used a unique email address like I always do. I opted out of allowing them to share my info. I also (like anywhere I give my address, phone number, credit card number) opted out of any sharing. For now I also allowed Vistaprint to […]
Archive of posts filed under the Spam category.
Blocking WordPress Comment Spam
Back in January I tried renaming the wp-comments-post.php file to avoid comment spammers. That worked for about 10 hours, then they started using the new file name. So I switched back to the default filename. Like I said back then “So unless you change the comment post filename regularly, it doesn’t do much good.” Well, […]
“Human” Comment Spammer
Wow, I’ve just received my first batch of comment spam from a real “person” (if spammers are to be considered people.) It’s all from the IP address of 121.35.151.27, which is in China. The first hit was this morning at 2:03am. “121.35.151.27 – – [13/Mar/2007:02:03:31 -0500] “GET /journal/2007/02/08/powered-by-wordpress-directory/ HTTP/1.1” 200 5080 “http://www.google.com/search?q=powered+by+wordpress&hl=en&newwindow=1&start=20&sa=N” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE […]
Using Tagged Email Addresses for Fun and Profit
Pascal van Hecke recently caught some spam that was sent to a unique email address he gave to Performancing.com. Read the details. One problem is he used a very simple tagged address that could be easily guessed. For example, I would guess that his MyBlogLog email address is mybloglog.com[at]vanhecke.info. So what’s to stop the spammers […]
216,031 pieces of spam collected at Gmail
In the last 3 weeks, my spam-only domain at Gmail has collected 216,031 pieces of spam. I’m interested in selling the domain. If you’re interested, email me privately.
Google Appliance Mail Update 2
Wow. Seeing is believing. After nearly three days, my catchall account in the Google Domain Appliancehas caught 67,930 messages; and has 3,185 messages in the Inbox. The amazing stat is at the bottom of the mailbox: “You are currently using 864 MB (42%) of your 2048 MB.” Looking through the messages, it looks like the […]
Google Appliance Mail Update 1
I just logged into the catchall account for the domain I added to Google’s Web appliance. Spam to the old box in my office has slowed to a trickle (only 61 messages last hour, down from 1,237 for the same hour yesterday). In the Google Web Appliance, there are 2,596 spam messages caught, 12 missed […]
Gmail
Back in May (see Gmail Collection) I detailed my results in sending a spam-only domain’s email to a new account at Gmail. I just logged into that Gmail account, there are 55,460 messages in the inbox, using 402MB. All but three messages are from January to May 2006 when I stopped forwarding mail. In the […]
Have you upgraded Akismet lately?
In the process of cleaning up after the comment spam bomb yesterday, I noticed that my Akismet plugin is a little out of date. I was running 1.15, and the Akismet download page says they now have version 1.21. After downloading and installing, I see it is actually reported as version 1.81. I’ve asked Akismet […]
Renaming wp-comments-post.php does not help
Yesterday afternoon I renamed the default comments post file from wp-comments-post.php since I was being hit hard by comment spammers. The new filename started getting hit softly about 10 hours later, although the old filename is still being hit. So unless you change the comment post filename regularly, it doesn’t do much good.