We have a customer of ours who pays us both for e-mail/web hosting as well as our anti-spam/anti-virus relay service, Swirbo. Swirbo is a service that filters mail by having mail for a domain sent to it first, via MX records, and then relayed to its final destination. Recently, this customer began reporting that she…
We’d have a recent spat of complaints from our Swirbo customers regarding their inability to receive mail from certain Google apps — i.e. if you invite someone to view a blog, or docs.google.com document. Today I got an example of the actual error they are getting: Technical details of permanent failure: TEMP_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state…
If you thought that anti-spam protection for your incoming mail would alleviate your e-mail problems forever, think again – another issue that can cause more than a few headaches are DNS BlackLists (DNSBLs), sometimes also called RBLs (Realtime Black List). DNSBLs are not a new idea, but their usage is increasing rapidly. In short, a…
Early this year, we posted the story of a spammer that left a comment spam on our site — circumventing the spam protection (Wordverify) manually. This week, their director of marketing contacted me asking to try to clear up the situation and convey their side of the story. I told him I wouldn’t amend the…
So, the inspiration for writing this script was so that I could quickly and effortlessly visualize some of the stats from my webserver logs on the fly. The reason was that I have noticed a huge influx of comment-spam attempts on my personal blog, this blog, and the Nashville Metblog. I have access to the…
Blue Security, the geniuses that made news a while back advertising their intent to create a network to DoS spammers, are back in the news again. The reason is hardly surprising. Blue Security themselves were the result of a massive DoS attack. How did they respond? According to this NANOG post, by switching their DNS…
Well, yesterday’s foolproof method of defeating trackback spam is today’s old news. Seriously no less than 24 hours after I proclaimed victory, I have started getting trackback spam that defeats the validation method by maintaining a list of the links, rotating out the URLs as it spams them — on the same page as their…
BMW.de was yanked from google’s index this week, for violating google’s policy in some shady SEO tactics involving javascript redirects. Good for them. (Hat tip: Chris)
Well, wordverify has taken care of almost all comment spam, except for human spammers, of course. However, trackback spam, since it is by definition automated when working properly, cannot be eliminated with that method. I had the simple idea to write a plugin that, upon receiving a trackback ping, would snag the referring URL and…
Earlier today, I posted about spam received in a blog comment that was clearly posted by an actual person. In that post, I mentioned tracking down (not hard in this case) and calling the company that appeared to be behind the spam, Advantage Consulting Services. Surprisingly, “V. Patel” called me back. I told him I…
