Rick Hurst Web Developer in Bristol, UK

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gmail, akismet and spam empowerment

all my personal mail now directs to my gmail account. Gmail seems to do a very good job of filtering out the spam emails as hardly any get through. When one does get through I like the way that there is a “report spam” button. This makes me feel empowered about binning those tempting offers of “life” enhancing pharmaceuticals, and takes some of the chore out of it.

I like to think – rightly or wrongly – that because I have proactively “reported” the spam back to google, their anti-spam machinery immediately takes note and stops any other gmail users from recieving the same piece of spam, either from the same source or containing the same content.

I get a similar feeling of usefulness when I report comment spam back to akismet (via my wordpress akismet plugin) – I like the fact that because someone tried to leave comment spam on my site they are immediately blacklisted by all the other blogs that use akismet, making my site more like a honeypot to trap spammers rather than an unguarded doorway for them to try and sneak into.