Akismet, WordPress’s virus scanner-remover hasn’t been doing as good a job lately as it used to. It used to catch all the spam for this site. They did such a good job I didn’t even worry about it. These days, a lot of spam is sifting through as “trash,.” Trash isn’t categorized as spam … and as a result, it isn’t blocked the same way.

I’ve been trying to keep up with it. Most of the spam I get is full of viruses, worms and who knows what else. Often it is pages long and each line is a link to something I don’t want any part of. Last night, during a look around my site, I casually checked to see what was in the “comments” section of my personal page … and I realized there were more than 3,000 spam messages there — all received during that past 10 days.

What?

“Ham” is e-mail that is not Spam. In other words, “non-spam”, or “good mail.” It should be considered a shorter, snappier synonym for “non-spam.” Its use is common among anti-spam software developers, and not widely known elsewhere. In general it is probably better to use the term “non-spam”. 

Note that Askimet’s assessment of “missed spam” is a lot less than the spam they really missed. They missed thousands of them this month. 

I tried to delete them in one go — as in “Delete spam” — and the site crashed. Which it usually does if I try to delete more than a small amount of anything. This system is much better at adding stuff than removing it. I finally discovered that 50 was the maximum number of spam messages the system would delete without crashing. I deleted and deleted and deleted and noticed that for every fifty I deleted, another half-dozen would arrive. All were labeled as some version of “buy cheap auto insurance.” The comments which are, I assume, copied and pasted from who knows where, ranged from gutter porn to a criticism of political views I’ve never expressed, as well as the usual offers to set me up for working at home for triple digit salaries every week.

Half of the incoming posts were labeled trash, which I converted to spam and then deleted permanently, but I couldn’t get on top of it. I finally copied the contents of my page and deleted the original. Then I pasted the contents into a new page. I went into settings and removed “comments” as the default setting. I can add it for any post, but it won’t automatically appear and this is important on those pages where we don’t usually look.

It took me hours to deal with this. I’m writing this as a warning: there can be spam and dangerous viral spam in more places than just the spam and trash folders. If you have other pages, check and see what’s wormed its way into the “comments” on those pages.

Maybe it’s because I’m getting a lot of hits from Google these days, but the volume of spam coming has gone way up. It isn’t the highest it has ever been, but it has been very persistent and worrisome insofar as half of it comes it as “trash” rather than spam. Sneaky.

Popularity is something we aim for as bloggers … but spam is the price we pay for it. I’ve been hit by more than 20,000 spam items this month. I know a lot of people think spam is sort of funny and cute, but so much of it is full of malicious malware and viruses, I am having trouble seeing the humor of it. Mostly, I wish it would go away. Oh … and all the spam in my regular comment pages is mostly from the same five or six spammers, except for another few dozen who call themselves “floor sanding” companies.

A lot of it was originally written in Russian, Chinese, Greek, and other alphabets I can’t read.

Floor sanding?

Cheap insurance?

Does anyone … anywhere … look at this stuff? The people who do this must do it for a reason, presumably. They are trying to make money, right? Does this stuff actually make any money? Is there anyone so naïve that they believe this is “real”?

Categories: Anecdote

Tags: email messages, ham, malware, missed spam, Spam, viruses