Spam Advice

I spent a little time on the holidays solving my spam problem so that I can actually use email again in ’07. Here’s a few things that I learnt:

WordPress 2.0 comes with a very cool plugin *by default* named Akismet. You can turn it on in the admin page, the only other step is signing up for an “API” login to WordPress. It good enough that I now accept comments to OmegaDelta from people who have not commented before (previously they were held for moderation). WordPress is very well designed, such that upgrading to WordPress 2.0 from 1.5 if needed requires hardly any effort – and no changes to the template (wish I could say the same about phpBB!). So I strongly recommend doing this.

Email was a little more annoying as I had so much spam to delete first. With that done, I settled on a solution using GMail as my email server. Fortunately this doesn’t mean I now have to use a gmail address (not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I just like ‘owning’ my addresses). I simply forwarded my current address to my GMail account, setup POP on GMail so I could continue checking my email from my mail client, and configered GMail so that it can send emails from my non-Gmail address – even when I’m using the web client. All rather impressive, particuarly that last point. Plus GMail’s spam filters are very good, and even better: the spam is not downloaded through POP, so I can just leave it there to get auto-deleted, or manually removed without having to download it all first (may sound trivial – but when you get thousands per week it does take a while to download).