However, email spamming in general is definitely a big dollar consumer (billions) and bandwidth eater. A free software, very simple to install at your server; edit spam words file and spam email addresses to delete spam emails; can be downloaded FREE from our website to delete spam emails at your server itself.

Satya (a.k.a freelance.dbperl.com/fight_spam.html)

I agree that Akismet desperately needs a “whitelist” function so you can skip checks on comments from specific IP addresses or any other set of criteria. It also needs to give you a “blacklist” threshold so that repeat offenders can be given a 403 error to shut them out, possibly in conjunction with Bad Behavior or http:BL.

However, I really suggest is that you setup an additional line of defence in the form of the math plugin for wordpress or a captcha plugin. It prevents a lot of bot generated comments so SK2 or Akismet don’t even need to process them.

As for Gmail, its starting to irritate me because the comments I make on my blog are landing up in the spam bin!

Seeing as Akismet is a plugin, surely it could be modified to let me overide what it thinks is spam, on a local level only.

First, obviously we need to go after the originators of spam – follow the money, as someone is getting rich or else it wouldn’t continue (lately, it’s gotten much worse).

Second, speaking generally, while some people might actually leave legitimate comments on one site, at other times, they’re spamming other sites from the same machine. Hence, they get snagged by the spam filter.

I had a client once who tried to run a small email campaign for his home business from his home computer. He was a Comcast cable subscriber, so any originating email from his personal machine quickly got his IP address blacklisted on SORBS and many others.

A reality check for us to see how good we actually have it is to turn off Akismet for one day and watch the spam sludge ooze back in.

For example, an account which normally gets 200 spam per day may get a single false positive per day while an account that gets 20 spam per day may only get a false positive every two weeks.

Although your email may look different from that of a 14 year old girl, you still are, in all likelyhood, recieving the same spam, which I am sure is tripping the same filters and getting the same handling.

While that is true, Akismet uses a centralized database with a neural net of some sort. People would have to radically change their blacklisting/despamming behaviour ‘en masse’ in order to affect Akismet to that extent. Same case for Gmail, I believe.

The thing about GMail and Akismet is that you have to train them – and keep doing it. If you simply delete the spam or move the false positives back manually you’re not populating the filter’s database correctly.

Now, if someone is doing this and still seein a lot of false positives or missed spam, I’m a bit at a loss

Most first time posters have no problem at all if commenting on new content. On older content they sometimes have to fill out the captcha.

As for Gmail, it handled the Christmas spam session fairly well, the only annoying thing was when my contact form emails started appearing in the spam folder though I have that cleared up.

Gmail becomes more disappointing with junk mail. I have it combined with Mail (Mac OS X), which is a pretty strong combination, but I still get these stock alert emails and RSET or QUIT emails that always make it through.

Thanks for the blog Andy!

I’ve heard that Spam Karma 2 does a good job with WordPress comments. If Akismet doesn’t start cleaning up it’s act soon, I am going to give it a shot.