Topic Related Spam
Posted by Mitch on Jul 12, 2010
Have you noticed that there’s a new and more sophisticated spam that’s out lately? It’s interesting because it’s actually related to the topic in some fashion, to the degree in which you just might leave it alone because it looks like the real thing.
 |
Only it’s not the real thing. You know it for a couple of reasons. One, it’s mostly a one line item, although I did get one that actually had 3 lines strung together. Second, there’s the little squiggly at the end of the message, which I just figured out where it is. Here’s an example:
my grandfather is also a baby boomer and he is also a war veteran~`”
Here’s another one that was actually on a post of mine on writing articles:
sometimes article writing too much time and effort, specially when you are writing lots of stuff~–
Anyway, all of this stuff is spam, and you need to be leery of it. Sometimes it comes with a link in the message, though neither of these did. They do come with some interesting links as the home domain name, though. The first message came from a site that I assume sells USB related items. The second came from something related to male reproductive systems; hey, that’s actually what it said! lol
I’m also starting to see this on a lot of other blogs, and people are responding to this stuff. Yes, it’s tricky. Sometimes it even comes with an image. But let’s be realistic folks If the picture is of a pretty girl but the name says “David”, it’s fake. Also, if the email address and the domain name don’t quite match up, there’s the strong possibility that it’s fake as well. The first one above for the USB stuff was sent from an email address with “brownies” as the domain name. The reproductive system one was sent from something called “kimber.”
I put it out there in case y’all have been receiving the same sort of stuff and either letting it pass or wondering about it just a bit. It’s spam; kill it.
Champion Men’s Mesh Shorts;
click on image
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
How To Tell A Post Is Spam
Posted by Mitch on Jun 5, 2010
You know, I wouldn’t think that most people couldn’t identify spam when they see it. However, I’ve been to enough blogs and seen enough spam even on those blogs where people seem to usually monitor what’s going on in their comments area.
 |
Heck, I know spam is getting pretty sneaky. Sometimes it’s hard to tell a good comment from a spam comment. If you’re not paying attention a new spam comment will show up on an old post, which is why I recently talked about making some posts private.
Still, you must be vigilant in fighting the great spam battle. If you don’t, not only will the spammers win, but those savvy visitors of yours that see you can’t tell spam from the real thing might decide to stay away. So, let’s see if I can help you out in some fashion.
1. Watch out for insulting spam. There are obviously trolls whose job, so they feel, is to make everyone else’s life miserable. Insulting spam is usually pretty easy to determine, though; it’s never on topic.
2. Watch for spam that’s not on topic. Maybe I should have started with this one, but I’m bringing it up now. There is spam that looks pretty good and you might miss it because you don’t read to the end. If a comment starts out intentionally evasive, it’s probably going to continue being so, or else it will introduce something that makes no sense whatsoever.
3. Set your spam filter to move a comment with even one link in it to your spam folder. Sure, every once in awhile you’re going to get a legitimate post in there, but what I’ve seen most often is someone following up a post with a link in it with a second post saying “hey, my post didn’t show up”, or something to that effect. I hope everyone checks their spam folders.
4. One line comments. Unless you know the person, you should probably just delete all of these anyway. Keeping something that says “nice post” is an insult to your blog, and is most probably spam.
5. Check out the email addresses. Most people aren’t using Hotmail anymore, but even if they are, if the name before “@” doesn’t make sense it’s probably spam. If the name you’re given is of one sex but the name in the email address is of another sex, it’s probably spam.
6. It used to be that spam didn’t come with images, but now it does. Make sure you read the comment instead of relying on the fact that there’s now a gravatar attached.
7. Now spam can come in your name. That used to be an easy tell as well, but some of the more sophisticated spam can read who the author of the post is and add it to their comment.
8. If the comment is written to the “webmaster”, it’s spam. Who really uses the term “webmaster” anymore anyway?
9. If the post is in another language and you’ve only ever written in one language, it’s most probably spam. Back in the day I used to copy some of those messages into translation websites to see if it was saying anything pertinent; just scrap it and move on.
10. Finally, if you’re not sure, even with these tips, you can always test the waters by sending an email to the email address. Write a short post saying something like “just seeing if this email is valid before I allow the comment on my blog.” If you get a rejection back, or heck, if you get nothing back, consider it spam and kill it. Even if it’s not really spam, if the person on the other end doesn’t respond, then they probably had no intentions of coming back to your blog, in which case you didn’t need their comment anyway.
I hope that helps. Of course, if you have Askimet on your blog it will help even more.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
Making Posts Private
Posted by Mitch on May 29, 2010
Last August I wrote a post asking people if they turned comments off on their blog, and overall it seemed many people hadn’t thought about it, though our friend Rummuser does after 60 days. At the time, I couldn’t ever think of a reason why I might do it, then another commenter, Doug, mentioned possibly doing it with posts that have a short message and wouldn’t need to be used again.
I started thinking about this again last week when I noticed some of the posts that spam seemed to be attracted to that was slipping through Askimet. The messages were going to those posts that were either put up announcing something specific and now the moment was gone, such as a webinar, or posts where the period for a comment wouldn’t make sense anymore, such as when I was writing commentary on WordPress 2.6.2, and here we are at WordPress 2.9.2.
Initially I thought about just going back through most of my 700 posts and eliminating the ability for those posts to get comments, then I started thinking about it a little bit more as I was looking at some of those posts. I realized that some of them not only didn’t need comments, but they really didn’t need to be seen by anyone anymore either. Once again, if I had a quick post about something, such as when I posted a quick post years ago when I launched my website marketing book (which is sitting up there at the top left, if you haven’t checked it out yet) reminding people that the launch date was fast approaching, why would I need to let it sit out there. It’s not going to help in SEO purposes, and I can’t figure out why anyone would need to see that particular page again.
 |
I started thinking about making some of those old posts private. What privacy does is eliminates it from the general public, yet allows you to keep it within instead of just deleting it. That way, you still have your consistent count of posts, you can still go back and track demographics if you want to see what your traffic looked like during a certain time period, and who knows, you just might want to look at it again some day to see where you either went wrong or right on something.
To make a post private in WordPress, all you have to do is be in the editing part of the post, click on the Edit link next to Visibility, and select Private, which is at the bottom. Hit OK, hit Update, and you’re good to go.
Does it hurt or help SEO? Some people might say that removing those posts will hurt your SEO because you’re removing things that help you promote your branding. Some people will say that removing those posts will help because they were pretty much throwaway posts to begin with, which means search engines will penalize you for them anyway and thus it’s best to get rid of them.
I have no real clue; personally, I don’t care. What I do know is that it will eliminate the spam for those particular posts, just as eliminating comments will do, and I pretty much don’t have to bother with them anymore since, when I go back through posts, I’ll be alerted which ones I’ve made private.
By the way, based on the other thing I said about stopping comments, I might as well tell you how to do that also, in case you’re thinking about it. That would be near the bottom of the Edit area, possibly at the very bottom depending on your theme, and all you have to do is uncheck the box next to Allow Comments, then hit Update and you’re done.
It’s going to be a long process going back through over 700 posts, but I figure I’ll get it done in small chunks.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
WordPress 2.9.2; An Update You Can Probably Skip
Posted by Mitch on Feb 16, 2010
If you have a WordPress blog, by now you probably have noticed that there’s another update, this time to 2.9.2. Unlike previous updates, this one corrects a minor security flaw that most of us really don’t have to worry about, so you can probably skip it. However, since I’ve mentioned that, I might as well gripe about it at the same time.
The security fix has to do with this new thing they added with 2.9 where, instead of just deleting certain messages, you can move them to the trash and then delete them from there. It seems that if you have people who log into your blog to do whatever, they can look at any messages that you have trashed. The concern is that if you trashed something because it was sensitive, you might not want anyone else in there.
Of course, I’ve kind of railed against having to sign into blogs to comment anyway, so in a way this penalizes those folks who have made people log in to comment; tough being you. As for what move to trash, the only things I move to trash on any of my blogs are when there’s a trackback and it’s coming from me from another blog I’ve linked to. I figure those don’t need to be there, and I’ve already taken care of not sending trackbacks to the blog I’m writing on because of the No Self Pings plugin I wrote about back in November.
My minor rant is against this “trash” thing to begin with. I’d like to know how many people have been going around deleting things from their own blogs, then suddenly saying “oops, I wish I hadn’t deleted that?” Frankly, it’s an extra step I hate having to do when I do it on those trackbacks. However, since they did that, why couldn’t they have added the one more option in their drop down menu to allow those of us who feel sure about what we’re getting rid of to delete at that point?
And one more thing. Have you noticed when you check your spam filter than if there’s something in there that’s really not spam, if you select Not Spam it moves it to your comments, but you still have to approve it? At least here the drop down menu does give you the option to approve the comment so you don’t have to touch it twice. Consistency can be our friend sometimes.
Anyway, skip this update if you don’t have people logging into your blog, or if you don’t ever plan on having anything sensitive that you don’t want anyone else to see in your trash.
by Paul Myers; check it out!
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
Insulting Spam
Posted by Mitch on Jan 28, 2010
You know, spam at best is normally irritating and nerve racking. These days, spam is taking on a new, direct approach that leaves me confused and wondering what some of these people are thinking.
 |
I can’t be the only one seeing it, but spam comments are actually starting to get insulting. Since I usually delete stuff pretty fast, I haven’t been charting a lot of what it’s been saying lately. However, I thought about it enough to save the last two examples:
“Even though this is very interesting, I don’t think I could agree with you completely.”
“Seriously? Don’t get me wrong, I’m in agreement with you partially, but when you say something like this you actually have to be ready to defend it.”
Many of you are probably seeing the same kind of thing these days. I know that because I visit a lot of blogs, I see a lot of them that have both positive and negative spam comments on them, and the owners of those blogs either thanking the people for their comments or arguing with these spam comments. Sometimes I find that fascinating, and other times I find that pretty sad. Maybe it’s because I’ve been on the internet for long time that I can tell it’s spam, but sometimes it just seems so pathetic seeing people trying to argue with something that’s been automatically generated, thus isn’t real.
Not that spam has any redeeming value to begin with, but I keep trying to figure out what possible motivation the people who send this stuff out have in being either rude or in attack mode. Most people don’t respond well when they’re being attacked, and when it comes to their blogs people are more apt to delete rude comments than to keep them around. My thought has always been that I don’t mind if people don’t agree with me as long as they keep a certain amount of decorum. I’m not going to allow bad language, and I’m not going to allow name-calling much beyond calling someone a jerk as long as there’s an explanation behind it. I figure it this way; I pay for it, my name is attached to it even if I’m not really a part of the conversation, and I’m not letting it stay.
I guess this is just the next stage of spam trying to find a way to seem as realistic as possible. I hope those of you who read this blog aren’t falling for this kind of thing all that often.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
Mailwasher
Posted by Mitch on Dec 14, 2009
I’ve been told that if you write a review post about a product that it will drive sales of that product, especially if what you have to say is very good and very true. Let’s see how true that premise is.
Back when I was warning y’all about hidden messages in email, I mentioned Mailwasher for the first time. I even pointed you to a review I wrote about it on another site. I’m writing this review that I hope will end up being different than the previous review, since I’m not going back to look at it before I write this one. And I have this program and I’m always telling people about this product and I’ve purchased this bad boy, so now I’ve just fulfilled the FTC thing that everyone is so worried about (except me; I probably won’t write about it, though).
Mailwasher is a software program that allows you to check your email while it’s still on the server. It doesn’t care what you use as an email program, so no worries there. However, by checking email while it’s still on the server, you get to decide what you’re downloading to your computer and what you don’t want to download to your computer. You get to see the links that are hidden in email while it’s still on the server to validate whether those emails are true or not. You can add as many of your email addresses as you need to, but I’ll talk about that one because if you have email being redirected you won’t have to add those email addresses.
Let’s start with what it looks like. Here’s a screenshot of the program in use:
Actually, the way you’re looking at it here is pretty small, but you can right-click on it and open it up to see it better. And I apologize to John now for now long it’s going to take to download this one for him.
There are some other categories you can have, but these are the ones I use, and I feel they’re the most important. You can also move the categories around if you want to. That first column is probably the most important because that’s the one where you can train Mailwasher on what should be blacklisted and what should be made friendly. The status box tells you what it thinks the email coming in is. It has its own way of determining what it considers as spam or junk, and it’s pretty good.
If you look at that last column, you see where I have two separate classes, personal and second account. Though I have lots of email addresses, I have all of them directed to one of two accounts, both through my internet provider, which is Road Runner. I have two separate email addresses for that. That’s important because when you create your accounts, you need to put in your username and password so that it can check your email while it’s still out on the server.
Now, for the bottom part of the program. That’s where you’ll see what you’ve been sent. You can see as much or as little as you want to see there. I have mine set to give me 445 lines of data, which is more than some might like, and less than others might like. But that’s where you’ll see any links that might be embedded in an email, and where you’ll see some of those strange words that you know means that’s an email with images and hidden stuff that might contain viruses or malware. If a friend is sending an attachment you won’t see that, but at the top you have a column that tells you how big the email you’re getting is, and you can pretty much bet that any email more than 200K has an attachment of some type.
I’ve been using this program for about 5 years now. I’ve only had one email slip through in all that time that had a virus on it, and that wasn’t the program’s fault, but timing. Once you delete all the email you don’t want anymore, you should then download your email. However, sometimes a new email is coming through at the same time and will slip through; nothing you can do about that. I swear by this program, and I really do believe that anyone, from those of us with a bit more web savvy than others, or those with very little savvy whatsoever, should be using this bad boy. Every time I learn that someone has a virus on their computer, I think of Mailwasher and ask why they don’t have it.
Probably because they haven’t read this review. Now that you’ve read it, think about your safety and see if you believe you could use a little bit of help. Trust me, the price is worth it.
And there you go. Now, let’s see what happens. 
Russian Spam Heavy Again
Posted by Mitch on Oct 21, 2009
Last August, I started noticing that I was getting a lot of Russian spam all of a sudden. I have no idea why, but at that time I had someone register to post on this blog with a Russian email address, which I immediately killed. After about a week, it stopped, and things were quiet for a long time.
In the last two weeks, it’s popping up again, a lot of it, on all 3 of my blogs. It seems like the oddest thing, but there you go. I still can’t figure out what these people think they’re getting out of spam. When I wrote my post on hating spam, I listed a statistic showing how there might be a possibility of some of these guys making upwards of $9,000 a day by sending all that spam out, then followed up less than a week later with another post on an article that showed that some of these spammers were probably getting less than 30 clicks a day, making almost no money at all, even with the volume of email going out.
Of course, we all know that, in general, many of these spammers are only looking for the links on blogs where the bloggers don’t care about their blogs anymore. That’s why I wish someone would pay me to go around the internet and kill all dead blogs, so these spammers won’t get what they’re hoping for.
Oh well; I’ll keep dealing with it, and hoping that it ends pretty soon. Glad I have that Askimet protection.
I'm Just Sharing is where I share my thoughts on internet marketing, writing, blogging and many other things. You never know what I'll be posting on. So keep coming back, read, enjoy, and buy! ;)
