I must say, over the couple of years, I’ve been dealing with spam on daily basis. Not only email spam, but comment spam as well. And it’s gotten much much worse over the past year. Dreamhost (my former hosting provider) tried to implement SpamAssassin but it didn’t really work that well. I was still receiving around 5 emails a day that didn’t get caught. I also tried using procmail to process email as it came in, but trying to catch spam at that lever is far to tedious.
I’ve sinve moved my mail over to Google Hosted (which has apparently change to Apps for your Domain). Google’s spam catching has been pretty good thus far with less than 2 emails per day slipping through (it’s actually more than that, but I’m not counting my gmail address that gets delivered to my .org address).
So, what IS this Akismet, anyway?
Akismet is a plugin for WordPress that acts much like SpamAssassin in that it filters throug the content of a particular comment and holds it for either approval or (in almost all cases) deletion. Akismet has been 100% for me. There have been absolutely no* false positives (spam that’s not really spam). Since I’ve installed the plugin (probably about a year ago), it’s caught *2,166 spam. Hurray for Akismet… thanks!
The way it works is similar to the way RBL checks work for email spam. Each time a comment is submitted, it is sent to the Akismet web service. Akismet then runs a bunch of tests on the comment and “returns a thumbs up or thumbs down.” You have to provide an API Key much like you would with other popular public APIs, but you can get one of those for free (as long as you’re not “making ‘mad paper’” from your site) from the Akismet website.
So, i just wanted to express my dislike for spam and that between Google and Akismet, I rarely have to deal with it. Thanks!
Howto Setup a Virtual Mail Server with Postfix/Postgrey, Courier IMAP and MySQL
I haven’t written this yet, but I should have some good stuff here on how you can set up a mail server using the above. My setup works pretty well at the moment and Greylisting seem to take care of 99% of the spam. Actually, I only have like 3 email accounts setup on the server at the moment and most of the email addresses are relatively new. However, I do see a lot of potential spam hit my SMTP server trying to relay to my .org account (even though my MX record is pointing to Google).
So stay tuned…
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