Spam in all its forms
Blog spam is annoying. Methods for dealing with it? CAPATCHs seem like a good way to do it. I saw a Bayesian plugin for WordPress but depending on how its implemented it will most probably need maintenance and training. Only one way to find out.
Regarding mail spam: a new form of spam has been hitting me and most people I know. The spammers have been reading up on their CSS to create what I’ve termed floating spam. Basically, the oh so clever spammers set certain tags in the email with display: float; so that while the source of the mail looks like a bunch of divs and spans with random single characters interspersed throughout, when rendered in a browser it will nicely spell viagra for you.
Traditional mail filters will be crap at detecting such spam. The only hope is a statistical filter - a bayesian should do the trick. GFI’s current shipping version will struggle a bit, but I’m working on an update. I feel our clients’ pain and an update is winding its way through testing and QA. If you want to know when its released, GFI ME12 only at the mo, then send me an email or leave a comment. Or subscribe to this blog 
One final “spammer” - MSN Messenger. My ‘lil sis wanted it installed to IM her friends. I had already set the default browser to Firefox (ofcourse). So why does MSN insist on bringing IE up? No excuses - its behaviour like this which keeps getting Microsoft in legal hotwater. They don’t need the hassle and neither do I.