Today in Emails

Some email about making custom smileys arrives from MSN Live. I don’t even use the “official” MSN client since I refuse to use anything that shoves ads in my face in an intrusive manner.

I do use the MSN Messenger service though, so it might be prudent to just unsubscribe to their marketing spam rather than [...]

Spam of the Year

This spam to my Gmail account had me laughing out loud.

Subject: Ihre Domain www.gmail.com ist nicht bei Google gelistet!

It’s a German spammer trying to tell me that “my” domain, gmail.com, isn’t listed in Google!

So yeah, you stupid spammer dudes at Finke Marketing. Thanks for the chuckles.

Snailmail Spam

I had a letter waiting for me when I got home after watching V For Vendetta, of which I might rant later. US air mail, eh? I rip it open.

Some silly domain registrar, Domain Registry of America (who in the fine print state they are not affiliated with or endorsed by the government of the [...]

SNAFU

The front page was b0rked for a couple of hours. I still had Movable Type installed, and it looks like someone managed to send a trackback (I had deleted mt-comments.cgi to prevent spam, since I don’t even use MT any more), which caused the front page to be overwritten by MT.

I took this as a [...]

An introduction to mod_security and how it can stomp comment spam and referral spam into the ground.

200:1

Since I switched from Movable Type to Wordpress, I’ve had one (1) legit comment.

And 200 attempted spam comments that Spam Karma shot on sight.

Addendum: 11 days later, and I’ve passed 900.

I should really stop doing this

The change should have been completely transparent and invisible to you, so here’s the info: I’m running Wordpress now.

So that’s the fourth time I’ve switched blog CMS this year. Movable Type → Wordpress → Textpattern → MT again → Wordpress.

The main reason for switching is that the comment spam problem for Movable Type has become [...]

Nasty crawlers

There’s a discussion on the TextDrive forums about how the MSN spider bot behaves. And it’s quite rude.

Microsoft wanted to be able to boast with a large page index when their new MSN Search went public beta. So they released the leash on the MSN crawler and let it index at full speed, saturating the [...]