RSS Feeds: Spam: Do You Filter It Or Do You Block It?
When it comes to spam, the bane of the Internet, how do you deal with it? Do you filter it or do you block it outright?
Over the last 12 years, I've tried a little of both. I found that while blocking will cut down on a lot of spam received, a lot of legitimate messages will get blocked as well. After numerous attempts at using various options, I've concluded that I prefer filtering. Prior to 2006, I ran my own mail server from home on a business cable connection. I had complete control over both inbound and outbound email.
What happens when you don't have complete control? As Andy Beard recently found out, even innocuous email can get blocked at the source. Fortunately for us bloggers, blocking or filtering comment spam is still under our control. We can choose to use the included plugins or we can add additional plugins. The keyword is choice.
Although the WordPress plugins I use are doing a good job of filtering (not blocking) comments with common spam words and phrases, one of them requires interaction from a commenter when a comment gets flagged. Some commenters won't continue with that extra step. For that reason alone, I just disabled that plugin.
Back to the subject of control over email you receive, I don't know what to do about it short of recommending something that most of you can't afford to do. I'm in the same boat as you are. When I don't receive responses to email messages that I've sent, I often wonder if the recipients even received them. How many messages have I not received due to aggressive behavior at the source? What choices do we have?
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I filter mine as well for the same reason you do. I often find messages from folks that are friends and family. Have a great day RT. :)
Greylist serverside, Thunderbird's (I think Bayes) filter clientside. Still a bit of spam, but practically no false positives. Works for me :smile: .
Who's your email provider? Obviously not Google or Yahoo or any number of the bigger providers, right?
Nope, it's my webhost. And a good friend of mine is the admin. So, I never have problems with customer support not being available :wink: .
I envy you. I used to be that kind of admin.
Yeah, when it comes to hosting, I'm lucky.
Anyway, 4 am, time to go to bed *g*.
Strangely e-mail spam doesn't bother me as much as it used to. I guess it's become so commonplace that it's almost invisible now. Also since gmail and yahoo have their own spam filters, I don't get that much spam in the inbox.
Forum and blog spam is still a concern, although there are techniques I use to fight it. As long as I used WordPress, i used Spam Karma 2, but in b2evolution, I have disabled trackbacks so that alone cuts down a lot of spam. Also b2evo seems to have some in-built spam filtering in place.
I often wonder the same thing as you do – do people aggressively block spam and prevent legitimate messages from being received. My guess is the opposite. They are so lax in spam checking that they receive 100s of messages everyday and are overwhelmed in trying to sort out the wanted from the unwanted that they hardly bother to read mails, let alone respond.