No comments at the moment

After a sustained spam attack over the weekend, my ISP pulled the plug on the mt-comments script. MORE...

Wysak Petroleum (WYSK)

Lately some cheeky spammers have found a route to my inbox trying to promote crap stocks (presumably that they want to blow up the price of before dumping their own holdings). If a stock was really THAT hot a tip - would you really email millions of people with your 'confidential' or 'hot' stock tips? I think not. MORE...

SMS.ac warning

A number of friends on MSN Messenger have been messaging me/emailing me and asking me to use www.SMS.ac. For anyone using it: You should all check your phone bills and / or read the below warnings before signing up (apparently the signup itself triggers the 'recommendation' messages automatically, not entirely unlike BuddyLinks): [...] MORE...

More info on Travel Express / Soho vacations

Comment posted by C earlier today in reply to Mary's information about working at Sohovacations: If this and the previous comments are not enough to scare anyone away from doing business with these people, I don't know what is... MORE...

Mass-scale open proxy blocking: MT Blacklist 3?

We all know it: straightforward IP banning does not stop comment spam. What DOES work to a certain extent, however, is locking out known spammers / open proxies, at least flagging comments from known sources of garbage as 'To Be Moderated'. [...] MORE...

Fighting back on comment spam: nofollow

Google, MSN, Yahoo, Movable Type and others have announced a common approach to try to kill comment spam: by applying a 'nofollow' tag to links, search engines will simply ignore them for the purposes of calculating rank and search engine results: [...] Genius! MORE...

Auto-blocking open proxies' access to Movable Type

In the category of sheer genius contributions to the fight against spam, let me point you in the direction of Brad Choate's newest plugin for the Movable Type content management system: mt-dsbl MORE...

Wikispammers

After the weblogging world started to get to grips with the comment-spammers, wikispam was the next natural arena for the spammers to embrace: I don't see why not we can't figure out a way for wiki software to auto-block spam; even integrating with the URL lists/patterns in MT Blacklist. MORE...

Nigeria blogspam

How low will they sink? Nigeria-scammers have now started hitting blog comments... MORE...

Commenting back online

Apologies to anyone trying to leave comments the last couple of days, I had some technical problems with MT Blacklist. All should be ok now thanks to Jay Allen. MORE...

Soho vacation - inside story

I have no guarantee that Mary is who she says she is - a Sohovacation employee - but then again I don't have very large doubts about her story. Here it is (unedited) for you to make up your own minds: ''I unfortuantly work for soho vacations. i did not realize what it was when i started they have an ad out for employee's they call it customer service representatives. i thought i would be dealing with cusotmers not selling a vacations package. but [...]'' MORE...

Make Your Cöck A Weapon

Seen in the spam box this afternoon: Subject line ''Make Your Cöck A Weapon'' ...now... why would anyone do that? MORE...

Sohovacation party on the blog

Several people have posted hearbreaking stories about how they were unable to get refunds for or profit from the vacation offers from Soho Vacations. ''Miraculously,'' however, last night three ''different'' people posted comments in rapid succession to the comments page: all 3 from the same IP (205.188.116.132), all praising the offer's genuinity, and telling me how fantastic the hotels and cruises were. [...] MORE...

Legit commercial emails gets eaten by spam filters

Commercial newsletters I subscribe to usually get through my filter. If they are technically deviant (using odd HTML colours, containing HTML only etc) I can always whitelist the senders if I really want their mail to come through (but if they can't even bother sending technically correct/valid emails, I'm not always sure I can be bothered reading their messages...) MORE...

How the Habeas Haiku is failing

Habeas is a service that licenses a haiku to users who agree not to send spam e-mails, and the prescence of this used to be a good indicator of legitimate email, since Habeas has promised to sue anyone who includes Habeas’s haiku in a spam message. Now, however, they seem at loss, and several sources online recommend switching off the ''Honor Habeas headers'' switches in their spam filter... MORE...

Cheeky cheeky spammers

Incidentally, I happen to be the jacobsen.no team, so I know this is a fake, probably intended to pass me a virus, open up my PC to send spam emails or something similar. MORE...

Novelty in the spam box

''Become a legally ordained minister within 48 hours. As a minister, you will be authorized to perform the rites and ceremonies of the church!'' MORE...

Using QMail for spam-tracking

1.5 years ago (to the day) I posted a rant about email addresses containing a + being valid. I've received a lot of comments and feedback on this posting (including several knowledgeable people posting about the RFC and more). Here is some detail on the qmail config. MORE...

BuddyLinks revisited (and removal instructions)

BuddyLinks has now been thoroughly described by a variety of press / online sites; here is a link summary + a variety of removal instructions - find one that works for you (if you got infected in the first place...) MORE...

BuddyLinks - a new twist on IM spam

WARNING! a company called BuddyLinks has created this IM spammer software. Once it's on your machine it will spam all your IM buddies in your name. This is a new and unique approach for IM spam, as it will bypass any whitelists of users you may have, and they trick new users into the system by presenting ''attractive downloads'' MORE...

Email whitelists are starting to work

[...] Whitelisting is gaining popularity with free webmail services like Hotmail, and this extract from a marketing email shows that marketeers are waking up to the challenge. [...] MORE...

''Greylisting'' to kill spam?

[...] mailservers temporarily rejecting incoming mail from unknown senders / mail server combinations, relying on RFC2821 (SMTP) error codes to force the sending mailserver to retry 10 minutes later. [...] MORE...

The sohovacation business idea

Caveat emptor! (Buyer beware!) On the Internet, there are many people who want your money... MORE...

Blacklisting spammers

Funny screenshot of a blog-spammer caught red-handed... MORE...

Christmas spam from Yahoo

''Festive fun every day 'til Xmas! Txt ADVENT to 87077 for Nokia tunes, logos & jokes - 1 per day. Loads more fun at Yahoo! POBox3650W45WQ 25p/day 16+'' All weird, and very annoying. You can do better than living off SMS-spam, Yahoo? MORE...

Norwegian weblog-spammers

Bliss. Only hours after installing the beta of MT-Blacklist (now out in v1.5), the first chancers trying to pollute the comments sections of my blogs were trapped. MORE...

Spam scares people off the Internet

Reading this just makes me sad. Usually being a complete techno-optimist, I can only hope someone, somewhere, will come up with the ultimate killer app to rid the net of spam once and for all... MORE...

jacobsen.no not selling Sildenafil Citrate

Someone has been sending out thousands of email messages promoting the sales of 'Sildenafil Citrate' (whatever that is) from (invalid) email addresses in the jacobsen.no domain. MORE...

Catching up

Catching up on personal email. SpamAssassin has caught more than 14000 mails since last time. (Screenshot) MORE...

What's more rude?

Blogger Steve Hatch's spamfilter blocked my email to him, and now I'm questioning my own spam-filtering strategies. What do YOU think should be done to block spam but ALLOW personal emails? MORE...

Jon Udell on SpamBayes

Jon Udell: ''I am ready to declare victory on spam.[...]'' MORE...

"Speed Marketing" = idiots' marketing

I've ''caught'' another spammer with their hands in the cookie jar - this time it's a Norwegian company, and they'll not get off the hook easily... ;-) MORE...

The dark side of spam filtering

Call me lazy, but seeing the way things are developing online, telephone and instant messaging is the way to reach me; there's just too much spam-email... MORE...

Microsoft and AOL: Against spam ..... or not?

''AOL and Microsoft argue there is a place for legitimate unsolicited e-mail in the marketplace,'' said Marc Berejka, Microsoft's senior director of public policy. MORE...

Nigerian counter-spam operations...

What happens when someone actually responds to Nigerian spammers? Here are two examples... MORE...

Blog comment-spam

Unscrupulous marketeers spam blogs' comments... MORE...

Linkbuilding spam-alert

I just received an email from a linkfarm-builder. I strongly discourage you to participate in their schemes, as it will most likely have the opposite effect of the desired rank-increase with the search engines MORE...

To filter or not to filter...

Although I see a legitimate use of promotional email; rather teach those users who wish to subscribe to such mailings to create a "whitelist" of allowed senders? MORE...