Whether you read email or have your own web site, everyone hates spam. Toward the middle of the year, I was being overwhelmed by comment spam on my site. Initially it was just one or two, then five or ten – soon they were comng in thick and fast and I couldn’t keep up with them manually. When that happened, it was time to find an automated solution; enter Akismet.
For those that aren’t aware, Akismet is a centralised hosted spam filtering service which has been developed by the same people that brought you WordPress. The whole system is very simple:
- You signup for an account at http://wordpress.com
- Install or integrate an Akismet plugin or wrapper into your preferred utility, blogging or other
- Revel in the glory of spam freedom
Akismet spam filtering utilises an undocumented system (probably Bayesian based), along with a whole bunch of secret squirrel stuff to knock spam on the head. When you combine a solid foundation, plenty of innovation and an enormous online community to power it; you end up with a very sound spam filtering platform.
Since implementing Akismet spam filtering at the start of August 2006, it has filtered and saved me dealing with a whopping 21,324 dirty dirty spam messages. It hasn’t returned a false positive for me in so long now that I lay pretty much 100% confidence in it; only giving the spam a cursory scan to make sure there isn’t anything legitimate in it.
Die filthy spammers, die.
Can you apply it to your email as well ?
Andrew,
You could potentially apply it to anything. There are development API’s in most common languages now, so if your favourite email client supports plugins; then it seems reasonable you could use Akismet to filter the spam.
Al.