Who still says “like a boss?” I guess I did. Get over it. But don’t get over spam. Especially annoying are the ones we know we accidentally signed up for. Because it’s our own darn fault. But luckily, there’s a lot more tools for dealing with bulk mail (solicited or unsolicited) these days. Most modern email clients have the ability to deal with spam. Exchange/Office 365 has clutter and junk. You can build rules on sites. You can use spam assassin on your servers. But, there’s also a nice little app called unroll.me. Once you sign up you’ll have 3 ways of dealing with each message: request removal from a list, mark as rolled up into a…
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Configure The Mail Service in OS X Server 5
Mail is one of the hardest services to manage. Actually, mail is pretty simple in and of itself: there’s protocols people use to access their mail (such as IMAP and POP), protocols used to communicate between mail servers and send mail (SMTP, SMTPS) and then there’s a database of mail and user information. In OS X Server 5 for El Capitan and Yosemite, all of these are represented by a single ON button, so it really couldn’t be easier. But then there’s the ecoysystem and the evil spammers. As a systems administrator of a large number of mail servers, I firmly believe that there is a special kind of hell where…
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Comments On https://krypted.com/
Comments on this site have been a pain since I enabled them about 2 1/2 years ago. I believe I enabled them due to something some judgmental person said when they couldn’t comment on an article I had written. During the first year, there was a lot of fine tuning the spam blocking to try and keep out the spammy crap. That continues to be a work in progress, but it seems to be in pretty good shape. During those couple of years I ended up racking up a queue of about 7,000 in the spam category and another 2,000+ in the pending category (which meant I need to deal…
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WordPress and Spam Bots
There are a number of ways that you can protect your WordPress site from spam bots. The first is to only allow authenticated users to post comments. Doing so can still be a bit unwieldy, but this feature is built into WordPress and so pretty straight forward to use. Some, who deal with large amounts of spam bots then choose to completely disable the commenting feature outright (Settings -> Discussion -> Uncheck Allow people to post comments on new articles), but comments can still be made on existing articles and commentary is one of the best features of WordPress for many. To stop comments on older articles, also disable commenting…
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No More Mingling
I’m just not that social. Therefore, I have removed Mingle, the social networking aspect of Krypted.com. I may reintroduce something like this in the future, but for now it seems that it’s just a source of frustration… Get MacTech
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Delete All WordPress Comments
WordPress uses MySQL as a back-end. I’ve seen a number of scenarios where someone was comment spammed. The comments weren’t approved and so never appeared on the site, but they were starting to fill up the MySQL database given that there were about 40,000 in one case and about 55,000 in another. In order to trash them you can use the following query from mysqladmin (once connected to the database of course): DELETE FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved = ‘0’
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Weird Facebook Spam
I once denied someone’s request to add me as a friend on Facebook and got an earful about how they bought one of my books and couldn’t believe I would be so rude, etc. Since then I’ve been an open networker on most of the social networks. It’s kinda’ weird sometimes to listen to people talk about how they keep track of their friends through feeds when I have too many to keep track of, but the tools continue to become more sophisticated and I’m getting closer to be able to do so. Having said that, there is a new thing I’ve been noticing recently. Someone adds you as a…
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Spamming Web Logs
There are so many types of spam I’m starting to loose track… I check the logs for my web site occasionally. I don’t typically have time to look more than once a week and I don’t have any time to correlate the logs against the articles or do any kind of statistical analysis. I just post what I am thinking about or working on and that’s basically what I have always felt a site like this should be. I guess looking at the logs is just looking for a little external validation… When I check the logs the number one thing I’m looking for is what sites are referrals coming…
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Spam and MediaWiki
Captcha is a nice anti-spam technique for websites. By forcing a user to enter a word that is a bit scrambled on the screen you can eliminate a large amount of spam that you would otherwise have to manually fix. reCaptcha is a free service that provides captcha functionality through an API. That’s what I’m using on this site and to be honest what I’m growing quite fond of. At this point I’ve leveraged it for about 5 sites in the past month and all have seen a dramatic drop in spam over previous techniques I’ve tried. This has been across Joomla!, WordPress and the latest: MediaWiki. The ConfirmEdit Extension…
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WordPress: Comments
24,000 comments. Pretty much all spam. I think I have to disable comments now… 🙁 I hate spam…