September 16, 2005 – 10:12 am
Thank you for continuing to submit your data to my anti-spam systems. I have been able to put your information to very good use, keeping my blogs and email practically spam-free 24-hours a day. The emails, comments, trackbacks, and referers that you submit are analyzed for key spam indicators, which I can then use to automatically block your servers so that your future spam attempts don’t even reach my web server.
Eventually, I hope to share my collected anti-spam knowledge to a wider audience, via WordPress plugins and web services available to the general public. [...]
I only had a couple of responses to my call for SpamValve testers. One of the testers has already begun using SpamValve on his FreeBSD server. The other is tied up at the moment, but is going to attempt to adapt it to work on a Linux server sometime next week.
In the meantime, I’ve started using it to filter spam hits to my mail service. This was accomplished with a one-liner:
tail -0f /var/log/maillog | \
perl -e 'while(<>){ m/Mail from (.*) rejected/; \
system("/usr/local/sbin/svupdate", $1) if $1;}'
The command above watches the end of my sendmail log for entries indicating messages rejected by RBL checks. [...]
I think I’m almost ready to let some other people bang on SpamValve. I want to get a closed group of users to try it out and give me some feedback before I release it to the general public. If you’re interested in testing it, and meet the requirements below, contact me.
Requirements:
- Requires root access on your server.
- Currently requires the ‘ipfw’ firewall system (I’m on FreeBSD). But if you think you can modify it to work with ipchains or some other firewall, feel free to give it a try. [...]
By Dougal
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Posted in Blogs, Plugins, Servers, Spam, Tech, WordPress
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Also tagged Perl, PHP, plugin, Plugins, Programming, SpamValve, Web
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Poisoning the well
Overall, the volume of spam attempts on my server have been down lately. Oh, I still get a steady stream, I delete over 100 comment spams (caught by my filters) each day. But I’ve seen fewer of the massive, server-squashing spam runs that hammer my web service with too many simultaneous connections, blocking out legitimate users.
On the other hand, I’m seeing a lot more attempts by spammers to poison the well. What I mean by that is that they are submitting bogus comments, full of non-spammy (but more-or-less random) content, and links to legitimate web sites. [...]