One of the reasons behind my extended hiatus earlier this season was the horrendous onslaught of Comment and TrackBack spam this site began receiving in early May. Even after I’d shut down comments and pings on old posts and upgraded WordPress, the spammers kept finding ways around my efforts.

Fortunately, a little bit of .htaccess coding and the Spam Karma 2 – Reloaded plugin have all but eliminated the Comment and TrackBack spam. Of course, there are occasional false-positives with SK2, but since it provides a “Second Chance” to avoid being blacklisted, the occasional blockage is usually short-lived.

Unfortunately, eliminating the 500+ daily comment/trackback spams barely made a dent in the spam that hits my InBox. For that, I’m still heavily reliant on Outlook Spam Filter, which has been doing an amazing job.

But I kind of like this idea, too:

Israeli technology firm Blue Security has set up a scheme to batter spam websites with thousands of complaints.[...]

Those signing up for Blue Security’s Do-Not-Intrude registry can have messages sent to up to three e-mail addresses monitored.

As well as these e-mail addresses, Blue Security will create some fake addresses to tempt spammers into sending more messages.

Any junk mail sent to these real and fake addresses is analysed for accompanying websites where people can buy the goods or services being offered.

A software program downloaded by those signing up then visits the spammers’ websites and fills in any online order forms it finds with complaints about the unsolicited mail. (Source: BBC News).