It’s absolutely amazing that people would take the time to either manually create comments on blogs they have no relation to in order to elevate their ranking in Google by embedding links, or, worse yet, take the time to write sophisticated bots to do their bidding for them. I used to employ a Captcha in order to weed the humans out from the machines, but even then, the manual comment spammers would get thru and I’d have to block their postings.

I’ve since gone to Akismet spam checking, and it’s working pretty well… no false positives yet, and no false negatives either… but the amount of attempts is bewildering. It’s already filtered over 250 spam comments.

Don’t even get me started on email spam. I get, easily, 250 spams a day through my various email accounts. Fortunately, Apple Mail does a pretty decent job of catching those as well. However, I still get 10 or so false negatives a day and the occasional false positive. This means I have to continuously sift thru the sludge to make sure I didn’t miss an important email, which has happened. I used to have a pretty good server-based spam catcher, but it started randomly crashing my SMTP server, so I had to abandon it.

The thing that makes me slap my forehead is the fact that spammers wouldn’t continue their flood of garbage if they didn’t receive some sort of return. That means that some (albeit small) percentage of people out there are actually dumb enough to fall for their pitch and follow the link. It’s pretty simple, folks: if they have to resort to such low-life ways of getting their message out, their message is not worth hearing, and is most likely a scam of some sort.

I know sending emails is a relatively cheap way to get the word out, but even so, I’ve got to think that if the click-thru rate on this spam went to zero, the spam would dry up.

I think what is needed is some sort of authenticated email system. The ability to send anonymous email over SMTP is entirely too easy. If people had to attach their true, authenticated identity to each email they sent, things would be much more above board. Shine the light and the cockroaches tend to scatter. I can’t think of hardly any scenarios where true anonymous email is necessary, can you? In the rare case where it might be, there is probably a different channel available for that communication.