I am the ghost of groovymother.com. Woooooo!

Cost of false positives - Laughing Meme

Lovely post from Kellan explaining why Twitter (and other sites) can’t “just block all the spammers”.

When your best users and your worst users share common outlying behaviour, things get tough.

The Elements of Spam.

Form the possessive of nouns by adding ‘s, just an apostrophe, just an s, a semicolon, a w, an ampersand, a 9, or anything. “My wifesd*porcupine hot pix for u.”

Inside the 'Ron Paul' Spam Botnet - Research - SecureWorks

Interesting insight into the control interface for a spam-blasting botnet.

Image Spam: By the Numbers

Good notes on the current state-of-the-art in the arms race between spammers and anti-spam software, trying to skip around OCRing images.

taint.org: Justin Mason's Weblog » SpamAssassin 3.2.0!

Justin’s guide to what’s new and cool in the latest version of SpamAssassin. Installing on my mail server now.

Hotmail's antispam measures snuff out legit emails, too | The Register

I’ve been experiencing this — Emails I send to HoTMaiL users are getting silently swallowed, neither bouncing nor ending up in their Spam folders.

Introducing http:BL | Project Honey Pot

Project Honey Pot announce a blacklist for IP addresses known to comment spam. This could be easy to integrate with a Django middleware…

Tracking Comment Spammers | Project Honey Pot

Project Honey Pot’s traps are now presenting spiders with forms that resemble comments/guestbooks/forums to try to gather some data on comment spamming. If you have a web site, it’s well worth installing the honeypot (or linking to a QuickLink) to help the cause.

Spamtrap

Art. “When a new spam email is detected by the installation, it automatically prints it out. The printed email slides down a track into the shredder that analyzes it.”

Technical Revenue: The Architecture of Mailinator

Interesting article on the architecture and design decisions behind mailinator.com, your local friendly low-hassle disposable email address site.

It's the name on everyone's screen. But is Southridge Ethanol really such a hot stock? | Special_reports | Guardian Unlimited Money

Anatomy of a pump’n’dump scam. Or: Why you’re getting so much more spam this month.

PhishTank | Join the fight against phishing

New open database of user-submitted Phishing URLs. Somewhat reminiscent of Mark Fletcher’s old “Trustic” startup. Not sure how well the submission/validation system will scale, or deal with gaming, but it could be interesting to watch.

FuzzyOcrPlugin - Spamassassin Wiki

SpamAssassin plugin which OCRs the images attached to image-only mails to work out if they contain text like V14GRA. I imagine this is massively CPU-intense, but it might be worth looking at.

Solid Wall of Code: AutoBan

MT plugin that adds “Deny” entries to your .htaccess file when someone’s clobbering you with comment spam, saving you the CPU cycles. I’ve installed it — if it works, I’ll be giddy as a schoolgirl.

419 Eater: The Incredible Shrinking Artwork

“Derek Trotter” gets a Nigerian scammer to ship a wooden carving of a Commodore 64. Just fantastic!

Gallows humor from inside Enron

When Enrorn was investigated, the contents of their Exchange server was made public. Here’s some of the more amusing things found inside.

Drunk Men Work Here - On Bots

Visualizations on how Yahoo, Google and MSN (and comment spam bots) spider through content.

Akismet for Movable Type

The hugely-successful Akismet anti-comment-spam plugin for Wordpress has been ported to MT.

SiteAdvisor blog: Spam-a-lot

SiteAdvisor’s excellent analysis of webcrap continues. Signing-up for “free” computer games gets you bombarded with 15 spam emails a day.

The E-Mail Time Capsule - Forbes.com

Email the yourself of the future. My email to my 49-year-old self ponders on SMTP, spam and the likelihood of me still getting emails at begbie.com.

Spam Stock Tracker

“Tracking how much money people can lose with penny stocks from spam.” Next you’ll be telling me that V!A6RA doesn’t work!

O'Reilly Network: Using Qpsmtpd

Finally got qpsmtpd up and running on my mail server. Watching the ngrep logs as it makes short work of spam is most rewarding.