You have pleased the technology Gods and we all share in the fruits of your labor. A plague of spam, thwarted!

Posted November 19, 2004 4:41 PM by sean bosker

That's interesting. I just found a great deal on lost frogs.

Posted November 19, 2004 4:43 PM by Hormel McSpammer

Hee hee.

Uh, don't kill me.

Posted November 19, 2004 4:43 PM by Alex Cohen

Heh. Isn't it great when it works?

My latest irritation is the regular raft of email to the subscription address of one of my mailing lists - clearly caused by -somebody- (probably sombodies) with an address book virus. I still haven't found a good way to deal with that, since it does seem to be legitimate mail.

Posted November 19, 2004 4:56 PM by xeger

Three hundred or so spams as a group seems to be a common pattern on what hits this web log.

Interesting. Did you get a copy of one?

Posted November 19, 2004 6:53 PM by James D. Macdonald

It's great when stuff works just right, eh?

Posted November 20, 2004 12:44 AM by pericat

What just killed my last email address was some spammer using my my email in the 'from' field. I was getting hundreds of bouncebacks a day. I made sure that they weren't actually coming from me, and they weren't but it forced me to shut down an email address I've had for years.

Posted November 20, 2004 12:52 PM by Sean Bosker

PNH/TNH: I've found that one area that the current version of MT-Blacklist lags the previous version is in dealing with large spam attacks.

I have MT-Blacklist configured to hide comments that match the criteria of potential spam. That means I need to manually approve comments on posts older than 2 weeks old, or comments with more than five URLs in them.

That also means I need to manually delete spams fitting those criteria.

With MT-Blacklist 1.x, that was fairly easy. Since a large spam attack would have the same URLs in every message, I could just select one comment, de-spam it, add the URLs to my blacklist, and then press the button that causes MT-Blacklist to check the 250 most recent comments against the blacklist, deleting any comments containing blacklisted URLs.

Later, rinse, repeat until clean.

The new version of MT-Blacklist does a far better job of tagging spam--it's been 100% accurate for me in the several weeks I've been using it. But it's got NO functions that I've been able to find for batch-despamming of messages.

If I were ever to get 300 comments of spam in one day, I'd hve to manually click on each of those 300 messages to delete them. Ow!

Have you been able to find a faster way of dealing with spam attacks, short of outright blocking comments on messages >2 weeks old, or with >5 URLs?

Sean, what happened to you is called a "joe job." Google that phrase if you want to learn stuff. As far as I know, there's nothing you can do about it.

Posted November 20, 2004 7:55 PM by Mitch Wagner

Here's an article that describes joe jobs and offers advice in countering them.

Posted November 21, 2004 4:42 AM by pericat

Pericat, good article.

When I said there's nothing you can do about a joe job, I was—to use a technical journalism word—wrong. I was thinking about Point 3 and Point 4 of the points raised in the article you cite: there's nothing you can do to save the e-mail account that was joe-jobbed, and nothing you can do to convince some people who will never believe your statements that it was not you who sent the original e-mail.

Posted November 21, 2004 3:26 PM by Mitch Wagner

I comment here to note that the most recent Open Thread is now a big enough web page to be awkward.

Posted December 2, 2004 5:45 PM by Dave Bell