Rubenerd

I've had email accounts since 1996 and have been using web-based weblog tools that allow commenting since 2004 (I got into this whole blogging game pretty late) but it's only been fairly recently that I feel like I'm drowning in all this spam!

Firstly to my Gmail account: despite the fact I [don't think] I've ever put my address on public sites unless I've encoded it or replaced the "@" symbol with the word "at" it seems the spam spiders that crawl across the net harvesting addresses managed to get a hold of it somehow. The result has been a steady stream of spam since about mid last year:

And get this: I emptied my Spam folder last weekend. (;_;)

Fortunately for a while the Gmail spam filters were excellent and were able to gobble up the messages without any problems; but just in the last few weeks more and more spam messages have been slipping through to the point where roughly 10-15 per day make their way to the Inbox. Does this mean the Gmail spam filters are failing? Does it mean the spamming spammers are becoming more organised or intelligent and are making their messages appear legitimate to automatic spam filters?

The problem isn't just isolated to email though. I could take it as compliment or a sign that my blog is more popular now, but probably more likely is that automatic blog spamming bots have detected my WordPress software and have added this (and the Show) to their spam rolls. Whatever it is the result is the same. Here's my spam folder on this site after a week without emptying it:

Fortunately my other two email accounts that are based at my web host and I download with Thunderbird on my MacBook Pro are safe… for now.

How much spam do you get? Once the boxes arrive from Malaysia and I can record my podcast again, I think I'll dedicate at least half an episode to this spam stuff. Where's Monty Python when you need them?