I hate spammers - comment spam and the gmail connection
This is getting to be very annoying. This morning I turned on my computer; was going through the daily routine of surfing through my usual list of sites and decided to check my email. I am using my hotmail account for all the emails related to this site. Every time someone posts a comment; it sends an email to me to ‘approve’ the comment. I have turned on comment moderating since I was getting a lot of spam.
Spam basically means that any comment that is posted with the whole intention of promoting a product. These comments are usually posted by bots. Usually I get about 5 of these. This morning; there were 40 emails in my inbox. I know my site is good; but no way it is that ‘good’ for 40 people to leave comments. 
Here are the final stats about all the ‘comments’.
Total 40
Valid 1
Spam 39
Popular spam topic Online Pharmacy
Email address used Gmail
Luckily it is very easily to ‘delete all’ comments; but it is still such an hassle. These bots are getting good too. Check out this sample message.
Hello admin, nice site you have!
ambien http://vvarder.cba.pl/ambien.html hydrocodone http://partizzanka.cba.pl/hydrocodone.html lorazepam http://partizzanka.cba.pl/lorazepam.html
That one was left by someone named ‘Monica’ at ‘Monica@gmail.com’. Here is one from ‘Anne’ (Anne@gmail.com)
Best site I see. Thanks.
You might say: “Hey, where is the spam in that? Maybe Anne really likes your site.” Sure, it looks like an innocent enough topic; but ‘Anne’ left a link to a online pharmacy where you can buy phentermine online via her ‘website url’ feature. If I would have allowed that comment; you would have intrigued by ‘Anne’ and clicked on her name to go to her website; and that website would have been another online pharmacy. Here is what Jennifer says:
Just found your home page its great, it looks like you folks do great service keep up the good work.
ambien http://vvarder.cba.pl/ambien.html hydrocodone http://partizzanka.cba.pl/hydrocodone.html lorazepam http://partizzanka.cba.pl/lorazepam.html
Gee thanks Jennifer. I will keep up the good work so that you will have a site to spam on. My favorite has to be ‘Kevin’. Seems like a normal enough guy who feels the need to vent on my site.
I can’t be bothered with anything these days, but such is life. I don’t care. So it goes. More or less nothing seems worth thinking about. I’ve just been hanging out waiting for something to happen, but that’s how it is.
buy phentermine | carisoprodol | phentermine online |
Maybe he should go buy some of the phentermine he is promoting!
The surprising thing is the that all these ‘people’ list gmail as their email address. Do they think that having gmail somehow makes them more credible? Maybe they think that they will not be associated with spam if people think they are ‘cool’ enough to use gmail? Each and every one of them had @gmail address. A coincidence?
[...] I posted an entry earlier talking about how much I hate ‘comment spam’. Well; it looks like I pissed off some of these spammers. Look at my apache web server access logs. [...]
You may want to check out sxore, it provides identity and reputation for commenters and thus prevents spam. Feel free to email me if you have questions. You can try it out by leaving a comment at blog.sxore.com,
http://securetech.blogspot.com/2006/04/get-rid-of-referer-spammers.html
Hope this helps
I’ve just been griping about the same thing. This morning, I found eighteen new spam comments on one of my blogs. I’ve turned on moderation, so at least the comments never post, but that’s annoying for the few (a-hem) real comments I get.
What is it with using gmail addresses anyway?
[...] Blog spam is getting out of control! I wrote a few months ago about comment spam on this blog ( Read Here). It seems to be getting worse this week. Today alone there were about 300 spam comments. Thank God I installed Akistmet; which caught all but 6 of them. [...]
Hi guys…
anyone else on gmail having problems ?
gmail is fine on adsl, but on my 3g card i can surf net no problem, talk on google talk no problem, but i cannot reply to any gmail mail. also cannot compose and send attachments. can recieve mail fine.
thought it was my beta firefox im using so tried IE but still same problem.
sometimes can reply to a mail but not always, especially if there is an attachment in it…
but gmail is fine on adsl so i know its not gmail themselves. 2 friends have also complained about their gmail on 3g today..