Granted I’m not a high-profile site and I certainly don’t get a lot of traffic, but I get no spam. And I don’t resort to what John Dvorak used to tell us to do: Drop everything that isn’t from a known good address.
I had three problems with that concept:
- What about e-mails from old friends who changed address (or current friends who like changing e-mail addresses every few months. Hi Andrew! :wink:)?
- It was never a good idea to depend on a completely spoofable “from” address.
- There is plenty of great software out there to stop spam in a much friendlier manner, and it’s been around for quite some time!
So what do I use an what are my results?
E-mail: SpamAssassin – And you thought the Apache group only did a rawking web server! Results? Maybe one spam a week gets to my inbox, and no false positives for the 3 months I was monitoring it. I’ve stopped monitoring it though – what’s the point of reading all that spam when I’m trying to block it?! 😀
Blog: Akismet – This is by far the easiest and quickest anti-blog-spam tool I have ever used! Included free in WordPress 2.0 (or was it 2.0.1?) and as easy to configure as registering on wordpress.com (I occasionally post scripting/programming stuff to Scripting. Stuff. anyway). Results? I think I had one spam make it to the moderation queue once. Not to the live site, just to the moderation queue. I could be wrong – I might be thinking of a legitimate comment that got moderated because of my WordPress settings (moderate authors without a previously approved comment).
Easy as 1, 2 … err 2.
Conclusion: Free and Open Source software rawks!
Disclaimer: Your results may vary, not a guarantee, not my problem, etc. 😉
Update: Just adding FSF and OSI links