The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
I've been wondering lately if there is a special place reserved in hell for spammers. I keep three blogs and a couple of websites. I post a lot of content online. Podcasts, video blogs, pictures, etc. etc. But there are few things that make me more angry then spam. Spam is the garbage e-mail that constantly fills up your inbox, sucking out your time and your bandwidth. Over the past six months or so, comment spam has emerged as well. With the explosion of weblogs, and the ability to post a comment on any site that you want, comment spam has started. One of my blogs has been getting hammered for over two weeks now. Fifty to 80 disgusting comments in each 24-hour period. It takes my time to clean it all out. It takes my energy to figure out a solution. It's also very frustrating to know that there are very few options that you have if it happens to you. The spam that fills your mailbox seems to come and go in waves, depending on what scammer is trying to sell what product. There are few things that you can do to actually stop spam, but you can work with the tools that you have to make certain that it inconveniences you as little as possible. For example, a wise move is to have a separate e-mail address that you use only for websites and blogs that you post content to. A lot of people also use a separate e-mail address for shopping online. Using a second (or even a third) address will keep your main address clean(er), but it is also inconvenient in that you need to keep checking the other addresses and cleaning them out. Another option is to spend the time setting up the filters that you probably have on your mail account. You can likely set them up to either exclude e-mail based on coming from certain sites or based on certain criteria (such as not being signed, etc.). or else you can do exactly the opposite and only allow certain things through the filter. Setting up filters takes time and they need to be managed over time. As well, you need to check through the spam that collects in these folders because they occasionally gather in real e-mail that needs to be rescued. Then there is the trouble of comment spam. Blogs have exploded. A new weblog is created about every second in the world. One of the defining things about blogging is that on most blogs, anyone is free to read what has been written and then write a comment on the content. What a perfect place for spammers to target. Over the last two weeks, both of the blogs I keep have been getting hit. One of them has been getting the gentle treatment. A few comments a day. Nothing disgusting or outrageous. Basically a bland comment, but with a link to a site. Basically a comment advertisement. My second weblog has been getting the royal treatment. Fifty-plus rude and disgusting comments each day. At first I just put up with the comments and deleted them as they came in. But I was worried about keeping up and other people reading the comments before I could delete them. Luckily this blog is based on Word Press software and I simply installed a plug-in that is called Spam Karma. This small powerful piece of software has managed to control the tide of stuff that is making it to my blog. Over the past week-and-a-half, not a single comment has made it through to actually appear online. Great peace of mind for me. Something to remember with this work is not to take it personally. Most times it is done completely randomly by a computer somewhere that is randomly sending out comments and looking for places to fill up. Spam stinks. It will cost almost $200 billions dollars in damage in lost work time, lost bandwidth, increased server costs, etc. this year alone. Even worse, Bill Gates promised that he would have the problem of spam solved by the beginning of 2006. I hope he's close. ([email protected])
