Night Dreaming (by Sudar)

Off late my blog has been receiving lot of comment spam. Though most of them are caught by WordPress itself I still needed to manually delete them. I planned to install Captcha to overcome it but then dropped the plan since it might cause accessibility problems and even W3C doesn’t recommend it (and me being a guy who believes that a webpage should be accessible for all :)).

Luckily Akismet came to my rescue. Akismet is the brainchild of Matt Mullenweg, the maker of WordPress. It’s a wonderful spam killer and integrates well with Wordpress and other bloging platforms too. Every comment left in the blog is sent to a web service filter which filters out the spam comments and the success rate is nearly 100%.

All you need to use it in your blog is just to enable it and enter the API key which you can get by registering with WordPress.com. And once you enable it you never have to worry about spam again.

It comes as a plugin with the default installation of WordPress, but I don’t know how I missed it all these days. You can also download it from Akismet.

So, one more reason for me to love WordPress.

Tags: Accessibility, Akismet, Captcha, Comment, Spam, Standards, W3C, Web, WordPress

Here is another interesting funny spam which has escaped Gmail’s spam filters and found it’s way to my inbox.

This one claims to be from eBay and is structured in the same way as an legitimate email. Even I was about to click the Respond button. But then something striked me. All the emails that I have received were only from eBay.co.in and not from eBay.com. And so I hovered my mouse over the link and found that it is getting redirected to some other server and not eBay. So as usual I clicked ‘Report Spam’

So the lesson learned. If you need some laugh and have some time to spend, then go to your spam/bulk folder and read those emails. But one word of caution don’t reply to them or click any of those links, they may track you and may find that your email is active.

Happy Spaming….;-)

Tags: eBay, Funny, Spam

Some days ago Jeremy was talking about a funny spam email that has escaped Gmail’s spam filter. And today even I got one such funny spam mail.

Just look at the screen shot.

The funny part is that the email shows my email address in the senders address and also in the subject line. This one was delivered to my inbox ( not in spam). And added to that when I clicked more options, Gmail doesn’t show that it was mailed from some other domain (which means that it was indeed sent from a Gmail address itself)

I am not sure whether I should report this as spam to Gmail. My reason for my fear is that I am not sure whether Gmail will consider my email address itself as spam or not when I report this mail. More over I am not sure yet whether some one else has received this mail with my email address in the from email address.

Tags: Gmail, Jeremy, Spam