Guide To Blocking Spam On Wordpress

Wordpress is a great platform for getting your thoughts out to the world. Unfortunately unscrupulous spammers also want to use your blog as a vehicle for spreading useless messages.

The main spam problem on Wordpress is comment spam. The origin of this is that people try to get links back to their own websites by leaving a comment containing a link on your blog. Sometimes the comment left makes little or no sense. Some bloggers have found themselves under attack as spammers use automated bots to find blogs that will allow them to leave a comment.

There is a way around this. The first is to use the plugin that is provided by Wordpress called Askimet. This is available on installation of all new blogs and just needs to be enabled. This plugin has a 'learning ability'. If some spam gets through its filter, mark it as spam (don't delete it) and the program will get more efficient at recognizing spam in the future. Similarly, check the spam messages regularly and if a legitimate comment is incorrectly labeled as spam mark it 'despam' and this will help train the software.

Another plugin that is popular for preventing comment spam is called Spam Karma 2. This program rates each comment and then decides if it is likely to be spam or not. It is available for free.

Another important step to take is to make sure that only registered users can comment. This will help cut down on the junk that is generated by spambots. To do this go to the admin panel and select 'Users must be registered and logged in to comment'.

These precautions will help you cut down the wasted time that you spend dealing with comment spam on your Wordpress blog.

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Why Are a Lot of Spam Messages Written Like Gibberish?

Spammers want their emails to end up in your email box, they want you to open them, and they want to advertise a product, perpetuate a scam, or spread a virus. Whatever their purpose, the emails are annoying and potentially harmful to your computer. A lot of these messages look like they are written in gibberish, which adds to the irritation and senselessness. Why are they written like this?

There are two reasons why spam may appear as gibberish. One is that they could have been written in a foreign language. So what appears to us as unintelligible symbols is actually foreign characters that have not been properly transmitted into English. This is also why there may be multiple misspellings and odd syntax.

Another reason why spam can appear to be nonsense is that purposely misspelling words, adding 0 when you should have o, and other techniques are designed to slip past spam filters. This works because some email filters look in messages for the most common words used in ad pitches and the like. By throwing in random words or letters, many spammers are able to evade the filters and get their messages into your in-box.

It can be hard to know if a message is spam or not, unless you open it. At that point, though, you can be letting harmful viruses loose into your computer. Because of email spoofing, you may receive messages that look legitimate but are not. A reverse email lookup can help stop you from opening harmful messages, as well as keep you from inadvertently deleting real messages.

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The Evil Email Marketer Strikes Again

If you're like me, you get about a hundred junk messages in your inbox a day. This is nothing new, of course, but after all our technological "advances", these scumbags still provide a giant thorn in the proverbial e-side. At the very least, these spammers can get rather creative with their subject lines from time to time, providing me with a genuine laugh for a moment before I blast their message into oblivion.

Perhaps the scariest thing about email marketing is that it works. I know it's hard to believe, but why would such efforts continue to be put into something that doesn't? Unfortunately, there exists a section of the population who weren't born with that ability to sense a deal that's "too good to be true." I suspect it's the same group who pays for groceries at the express checkout with pennies and then drives home doing 20 under the limit in the passing lane.

For the rest of us, it is mind boggling. A mysterious email shows up in our inbox by a guy we've never met, using a Hotmail or Gmail address, with no web site, offering us the best services money can buy. I like to compare this scenario to buying a home theater system, not at a department store but from a stranger, out of the trunk of his car in an empty parking lot under veil of night. No storefront, no credibility, no return policy, no guarantee that both parties wouldn't take your money and run.

So how does a spammer get your email address in the first place? The most common way is through purchased email lists. These lists are compiled from web sites that don't believe in a good privacy policy. By signing up for newsletters or creating an account to shop online, you're potentially giving out your email to people who sell it to spammers. Even adding your email link to your web site exposes it to email "scrapers." (scripts that crawl the web finding email addresses)

If your host or ISP offers disposable email addresses, use them. By creating an email unique to the service you sign up for (ie. john-newsletter@mydomain.com ) I can tell right away that if I get any spam in the future to that email, I know the newsletter I signed up for is sharing my email with others.

A recent report out of the UK says that small business owners lose an average of £2,000 (about $4000 USD) per year in fighting spam (businesszone.co.uk, April 2, 2008). McAfee has even gone so far as to give volunteers pre-paid credit cards, asking them to respond to unsolicited emails selling products and keep a diary of their experience. Their hope is to show the public the dangers of illegitimate email offers in an effort to raise awareness.

Spam is a real problem and will continue to be despite the genuine efforts of some to fight it. However, if the average email user was more informed and actually made a concerted effort to deal with it, the Web would be a far nicer place than it is today. The popular theory has been that if we all had to pay a fraction of a cent for each email we send out, it would eliminate spammers who get away with "email blasting", a practice where thousands of emails are all sent out at once. But until that happens, it's up to the general public to safeguard themselves and do their part in taking up the fight.

For future reference, the Federal Trade Commission offers an email address you can forward your spam to: spam@uce.gov - don't expect a reply; but yes, they assure you that your emails actually go somewhere.

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Spam Filters - Prevention Better Than Cure

You must have seen your mail box full of unwanted messages and how annoying it is to read and delete the unwanted mails. So where do you think they come from and what are they actually?

Let's go into the details of spam and how to combat it. Few people try to disrupt the activities on the internet by overflowing other people's mail box with superfluous messages. Spam creators actually are paid for the emails used to advertise the company's products or services. Spam can be posted from various media sites and forums and they are created in such a manner so that they can bypass the spam filters and even the spam detectors. Spam creators mess with several people who try to avoid unwanted emails.

With the increase of spam creators, the companies are growing more and more concerned about the numerous ways to stop spam mails. Internet users should be observant about the new techniques developed by the spam creators to disguise their mails. It is only through the spam filters that one can attempt to stop the annoying emails. These blockers filter out emails specially those that have come from unknown sources.

Function of a Spam Blocker The spam blocker help to stop spam from reaching your mail box and by this you can save the storage space and time needed for reading the junk emails. There are many spam blockers available in the market and they search for the incoming mails and protect the computer from all kinds of spam. The pop ups are the main sources of information to the spam creators. Once they are clicked upon, they can cause danger to your mail box. Email from known sources may also contain viruses. It is only through a reliable spam blocker that you can operate efficiently and prevent the unwanted mails from blocking your computer.

Most spam filters automatically separate the junk mails into a separate folder so that it can differentiate between a spam and a genuine email and the junk mails are then deleted. Even if a filter is installed in most of the computers, the problem still persists. Having a software installed does not solve the problem totally. It is important to anticipate the loopholes in the performance of this software and take the necessary actions accordingly. Sometimes even the legitimate mails are blocked, so double checking the anti spam software is required in order to ensure that no important transactions are missed out. You have to be innovative in order to stay abreast with the current anti spam products and prevent your business from being damaged. Some of the efficient spam blockers are Spam Bully, Spam Inspector etc.

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How Spam Filter False Positives Harm Your Business

Unless you live in a cave --and one without a computer at that-- you're very familiar with the huge time waster that sifting through mountains of email spam can be. And while spam is a huge annoyance for employees and end users everywhere, the real costs for businesses are in time and money and they're increasing every day. As costs rise, IT people (at SMEs in particular) are desperate for ways to deal with it effectively.

It's estimated that 100 billion spam emails fly back and forth, dirtying up the internet every day. A lot of these emails end up on in business email boxes, and employees are forced to spend their mornings sifting through mountainous piles of spam. All of which is time they're spending not working.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Spam Filters

Installing anti-spam filters is really the only effective way to deal with day-to-day spam within a company. These filters work to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, allowing the good emails through and tossing the junk in the trash. They do this by combining several different types of technology and updating almost constantly. And while the highest quality spam filters do provide relief, sifting out about 98% of a company's spam, they're still imperfect.

Why? Unfortunately, spam filters occasionally have trouble telling what is wheat and what is chaff (to stretch an already-tired metaphor), and toss some important emails out along with the junk. And while they don't occur that often, 'false positives' can still become a problem for business owners.

One solution to the problem of false positive is adjusting the sensitivity of the company's spam filters. The way this works is simple: the higher the sensitivity, the more spam is caught. But the higher the sensitivity, the more valid emails will be taken out with the trash. Increasing the sensitivity of spam filters can cost companies a heck of a lot more money than too much spam after all, customers don't like it when their emails go ignored.

The Direct and Indirect Cost of Anti-Spam Filters

Even one little missed email can get a company in deep water. A law company based out of Colorado, for example, missed an email containing some important information about a court date and ended up missing an important day in court. The cost? They were required to pay all of the fees for the opposing counsel.

How did this happen? To combat spam, the company's IT department had turned up the sensitivity of their email filters. Apparently, the United States District sounded pretty spammy to these super hyper filters, and it costed this company thousands of dollars in fees. Ouch.

While this is a nice and obvious example of how false positives can lose a company money, in most cases it's simply not that cut and dried. Most monetary losses aren't direct; they come from a loss of business and credibility. When an email from a client is gobbled up by the spam filter and a big business deal falls through because the client feels ignored, it takes a lot of work and public relations to get that client back. And sometimes it never happens.

In addition to directly losing a company money, false positives can affect productivity just as much as an overload of spam can. If employees are used to seeing a lot of their important emails get junked, they will have to spend valuable time sifting through their spam folder for genuine emails. How much can that cost? More than you'd think. According to Ferris Research, recovering a genuine email from a spam folder costs an average of $3.50 of that employee's time. Especially if you don't experience many false positives, it may not seem like much but in a company of 500 people who have to fish out two emails from their spam folder a month, it adds up to $42,000. Does that sound like an itty-bitty expense to you?

It doesn't to most other business owners, either. And to reduce the number of false positives --and the amount of business lost-- many businesses don't use any anti-spam filters at all. And while it's hard to judge them for wanting to prevent a loss of business, going without a spam filter opens them up to all sorts of problems. Taking care of spam is just too important.

Striking a Balance

But how do you deal with spam and reduce false positives at the same time? The best method is to set aside all mail marked as spam into a special folder so that users will have access to it, and can check it often. While this may seem time-consuming, with good anti-spam software it really doesn't have to be. The better the software is at recognizing obvious spam, the fewer emails will end up in the junk folder.

As spam filters improve, so do spammers. Because of this, spam filters will probably never be 100% effective-- the ones that will delete every piece of spam will generally delete a few important emails along with it. And the ones that let all the important stuff though will also let in a bit of junk. But using a good, well-configured anti spam software and integrating it with your email server can really reduce the amount of spam that end users receive, as well as the rate of false positives you experience.

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Why is My Mailbox Always Full?

If you've tried to make some decent money online, you'll probably start off all fresh and somehow get all caught up with thousands of emails weekly or even daily and wondering how you could better organize yourself... Yes, spam mails and scam mails are flooding your inbox and in your efforts to filter off the nuisance kind of emails, you might accidentally be filtering off emails that really matter to you and wasting a lot of unrecoverable precious time!

What happened? You might be asking... or you might already know the answers but not realizing it...

See, when you begin to opt in to opportunities or join some form of list which involves some form of subscription or verification, your mailbox nightmare has arrived. That's just the beginning... This is a self-created mess coupled with other people's marketing mess... Then, as an enterprising netpreneur, you start to build your own list(s) and allow people to subscribe or opt in through your websites or blogs or capture pages... Then, you'll find your inbox getting fuller than usual...

Well, here's why. The people who opt in to your list might be your uncool "competition" or some spammy marketer who surprisingly could also be marketers who are making loads online using these unethical spamming techniques. I shall not mention names. They know who they are and they know that there are people who know so too. They would even include some of the big names... This is nothing new. Most of these people are also junkies who are trying to make a quick buck.

See, people who have been online long enough know that if they can just get into someone's inbox, it's a matter of time they make their sales provided their email series can convert. I shall not mention names, but if you see such people appearing in your inbox, what I'd suggest you to do is either filter them into a junk folder... or seek out their email address(es) from your list(s) and unsubscribe them. I'll usually do the former myself.

How did they do it? See, they just need to set up an autoresponder email series, and opt into your list using their autoresponder email address. So, every time your own autoresponder sends them an email, you'll receive their series all over again. Okay, sometimes it's just a single autoresponding email instead of a whole series. Some will even spam you with your own email address and/or spam others as well using a fake email account that seems to originate from you, maybe in the hope to get your domain name into trouble. Something like nonsense@your-domain-name.com. Whichever the case, it's still a form of unethical spamming.

Along with these undesirable emails, you'll get all kinds of scams too! So, how do you solve your inbox problem? The key lies in managing your inbox. If it's too much of a problem, get a new email account. To be wiser, have your personal and business email accounts as two separate email accounts. That will save you a lot of trouble when it comes to the probability of you receiving spam and scam emails.

Please share this article with as many people as you can so that we can fight this kind of unethical spamming more effectively. Thank you for your kind attention =)

With less garbage to deal with, you'll have more energy to deal with things that really matter.

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