The Ongoing Spam Battle

Posted by Thomas J. Brown at 1041 hrs

After a recent deluge of spam comments to my blog, I have decided to block all e-mails coming from the mail.com domain. While mail.com appears to be a legitimate service, I get enough spam coming from their servers to warrant blocking it. Adding further to the decision is the fact that I have never, in almost 7 years of operating this blog, received a legitimate comment from anyone using a mail.com address. If a legitimate user does come along with a mail.com address, well, that's just too bad for them.

What really irritates me is that a lot of the spam is coming from addresses at yahoo.com and gmail.com. It's also doing a great job of fooling MovableType's spam filter, so nearly everything is getting posted. The only protection I have against those types of spam comments are to carefully track the IP addresses and ban the ones that seem to be causing the most trouble. I don't like banning IPs, since they're so easily spoofed, but when 3 or 4 dozen e-mails all come from the same handful of IPs, it's time to do some banning.

So the battle continues. For now, I'm winning. I hate to think that a day will come when I have to make changes that inconvenience users, or worse, stop accepting comments altogether.