Blocking Russian Spam Comments with WordPress

I've got no idea if the amount of spam comments I receive are abnormally high, but the bulk of the comments that slip through are Russian spam, covering topics ranging from porn videos to business degrees to torture films.

WordPress 2.7 and newer offer a Comments Blacklist (Settings > General) that allows you to provide a list of words that if found in a comment, will automatically flag it as spam.

The following list of words has been working well for me:

  • эротика – erotica
  • порно – porn
  • фото – images
  • школьницы – schoolgirl
  • аниме – anime
  • экзотика – exotica
  • Ьпорно – porno
  • порнофильм – pornofilm
  • Ьпорнофото – pornofoto
  • видео – video
  • онлайн – online
  • анал – anal
  • праститутки – prastitutki (assuming prostitute)
  • хентай – Hentai
  • пытки – torture
  • скачать – download

Formatted for the Comments Blacklist that becomes:

эротика
порно
фото
школьницы
аниме
экзотика
Ьпорно
порнофильм
Ьпорнофото
видео
онлайн
анал
праститутки
хентай
пытки
скачать

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Posted in Technology on April 13th, 2009 at 12:04pm

Comments (3)  | 

Outlook 2007 wants you to get spam

Update 10/29/08: Microsoft says they'll fix this in Outlook 2007 Service Pack 2! The waiting begins…

I hate Outlook 2007 with the white hot heat of a thousand suns.

Why?

Because I've just exposed my email address to thousands of spam harvesting little fucks.  I've gone out of my way to not use this address for anything other than corresponding with friends and trusted business partners.  If I don't know you, you get a throwaway email.

And is where the story begins.

Inbox:Spam ratio

I have a catch-all address configured that I use for signing up for for websites, and it works great.  The downside is it gets a staggering amount of spam.  3 years worth of messages and I've got 2758 messages in my inbox.  And there are 10,041 pieces of spam in the past 30 days.

That's fine though, because I've only had a few false-positives that I care about (or at least noticed), and I don't even look in the Spam folder unless I'm expecting something.  To make my life easier I've been POPing my mail into Outlook, the one downside being that it doesn't synchronize reads or deletes.  When I upgraded my desktop last week I decided to switch to IMAP, because who doesn't want more synchronization, right?

It turns out there is an incredibly nasty bug in Outlook 2007.  Scream and pull your hair out and pray for testicular cancer in all of the male developers bad.  Not data loss, no, that's manageable if you backup regularly.  No, it's not emails not being delivered either.

No, the problem is that Outlook doesn't honor your "Read Receipt" option.  If Outlook has synchronized with the server and downloaded messages, and then you delete the message elsewhere, Outlook will send the Read Receipt the next time it synchronizes with the server.

And because every shit eating kid with a botnet and a list of email addresses to sell wants proof that an address is alive, spam almost always is sent with a Read Receipt requested.  This means that if you're using some relatively unknown webmail service like GMail along with Outlook, you're in for a world of hurt.  The next time you (or GMail) deletes spam messages a slew of read receipts will be sent out to wonderful people like Monty Savage or Данила Алексеевич.

That's not the worst part though. The worst part is that if you're using Exchange, that address will be exposed. Presumably it's whatever your primary email address is. That email address that you've kept secret, cherished, coddled and protected for years will be ravaged and exposed to the world.

Steps to reproduce:

  1. Add an IMAP account to Outlook
  2. Send a message to the IMAP account email address with Read Receipt Requested from a different email account.
  3. Send/Receive until the message appears in Outlook
  4. Delete the IMAP message from a different client (eg, GMail). Make sure to completely delete the message (check the Trash folder on GMail).
  5. Send/Receive in Outlook again.
  6. Return to the sending account to see the unexpected read receipt.

The read receipt will be similar to:

Your message

To: primary_email@address.com
Subject:

was deleted without being read on 10/27/2008 4:20 PM.

Where primary_email@address.com is not necessarily the address you sent the email to.

It doesn't matter if you set your options to always send a read receipt, never send a read receipt or prompt before sending a read receipt. Outlook does what Outlook wants, and Outlook wants you to suffer and drown in a flood of spam.

Did I mention that this bug was reported around 15 months ago?

In closing, if you are one of the developers who decided that this wasn't something worth fixing, I hope you die in a fiery car crash.

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Posted in Personal, Software, Technology on October 27th, 2008 at 08:10pm

Comments (7)  | 

Bulk delete messages on a BlackBerry

Have you ever received a slew of messages on your BlackBerry, none of which you want or need? One of my BIS accounts receives a moderate amount of spam, all of which is flagged by SpamAssassin with [SPAM] in the subject line. I've tried setting filters at BIS, but they never seem to work. Fortunately there's an easy way to quickly delete all of the offending messages at once.

Step 1 – Searching

From the Mail window open the menu and choose Search. Enter parameters that will find all of the messages you want to delete, and only the messages you want to delete. In my case it's anything with [SPAM] in the subject.

Step 2 – Search Results

Review the search results and make sure they don't contain any messages you do not want to delete. If the results do contain messages you don't want to delete you will need to refine the search parameters to exclude them.

Step 3 – Delete Prior

This is where the magic happens. Select a date heading, open the menu and choose Delete Prior. If a message is highlighted and not a date heading you will not have a Delete Prior option.

In the context of search results, Delete Prior will only delete messages that were found by the search, not everything prior to the date of the first result.

Wait, what about BES users?

No guts, no glory. Go ahead and try it.

If you're more timid, Delete Prior only removes messages from the handheld, not the desktop. I've never tested this with any of the bi-directional sync BIS email options like GMail or Yahoo, so if you're using one of those services you should test first.

Confirm that you want to delete the messages and after a moment you'll see that all of the messages have been deleted and you're free of spam, printer notices or emails from Wiskus. Let's see your iPhone do this!

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Posted in BlackBerry, Technology on June 24th, 2008 at 11:06am

Comments (5)  | 


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