Category: spam

Categories
spam

Fighting spam in gmail

Everyone hates spam, and like everyone else I get tons of it. So I’ve of course written about it two times before. Earlier this week we migrated over to a better email solution, so that we could get SPF working properly. SPF should help google figure out what is spam and what is not. In the process I went through all my old spam (all 4200 hundred of them) and found the following patterns to be  effective in cleaning my spam folder:

Matches: (Pfizer || replica || diploma || pharmacy || meds || pills || male enhancement || BuyCializ || http://www.nobelbarmoebelonline.com || http://www.nobelfahnenmitmast.com || http://www.nobelbarmoebel.com || Bestellseite || http://www.nobeltannenonline.com || http://www.nobelgewerbetools.com || health || Reinigungswirkung || britney spears || http://www.edelebarmoebel.com || http://www.edelefahnenmitmast.com || http://www.alumastmitfahnen.com || 성명 || 주식 || Проверки || Damen und Herren || и || видео || lv-bestbag || lv-bagshop || 밤세상)
Do this: Skip Inbox, Delete it

BIG FAT WARNING: This list is of course highly personal, and you should check how many in your inbox it matches, before installing it.

With this list in place I get about 10-15 spam a day and I can actually go through my spam box to look for false-positives. Sadly something that still happens way to often 🙁

Categories
spam wordpress

How to stop wordpress spam

We had trouble on the Nemo blog because some stinky casino spam overlord had found our nice little blog. Luckily the spam started of slow so I had a change to try different solutions to fight the problem. I went trough updating wordpress, to update Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam, to installing akismet, to try reCAPTCHA before I found the perfect solution WP hashcash. None of the other techniques got 100% of the spam. The wordpress plugin uses the clever hashcash technique (first proposed to fight email spam) implemented in javascript, to force a poster to pay a small amout of cpu time for each post. Supposedly though, the biggest effect just from requiring the client to have javascript installed in order to post 😉

Categories
Personal spam

How I learned not to care about spam

So about a year ago I was starting to get a lot of spam so I tried different techniques to combat the problem. Long story short, the solution I found to be the most effective was simply to use bogofilter. After using it for about a year without any retraining I finally had to retrain my filter as there was 2-3 specific kinds of mails it kept misclassifying as non-spam. During that period only 100-200 spam mails had been registered as legitimate mail and 45000 spam mails had been correctly classified. I stopped checking for real mails classified as spam after about 2 weeks of no false positives. That’s pretty damn impressive. All hail bogofilter 🙂