The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Dave:

I'm using Popfile and SpamAssassin on my home Linux box, and I'm deliriously happy with the combo. I aggregate 5 or 6 different e-mail accounts with fetchmail, run all of them through those things, and then get all mail via Eudora and Mail.app on my Windows and Mac workstations. PF and SA together are significantly better than either individually. I catch about 80 spams a day - maybe 1 or 2 spam a week get through (and decreasing as bayesian systems learn) with one righteous email getting caught in the last six months. I have effectively no spam problem anymore. Nonetheless I am still going to decommission my longlived address that used to be posted to web pages and is now spammed frequently.

I've seen "referrer spamming" happen on my weblog. Some bot will load a few of my pages. In the referer part of the HTTP request is some page of no relation to me and that doesn't actually contain a link to me. The bot hits it a few times in quick succession, enough to show up in the dynamically generated list and then the bot is gone. When I see a new site that I don't recognize, I check to make sure it isn't one of these and if it is I block that host from the referral list.

This is just one more technique of throwing it all against the wall and seeing what sticks. Each of these is a low probability play for driving up traffic, but it is cheap and quick and probably helps with googlesque rankings. It's true, the street does find its own uses for things.

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