noel alanguilan

there is e-mail spam and, if you have a blog, there’s comment spam.

its always going to be there. its a fact of internet life. you live with it.

if you can’t then i can think of a thumbful of ways to avoid it:

• do not get an e-mail address. if you do get one, do not use it and do not publicize it.
• do not get your own blog. if you do get one, do not post anything and do not publicize it.

those should be easy enough to follow. but beware. if you stray from those instructions you will get unwanted stuff in your net space. guaranteed.

should you decide to live like the rest of us, there are software and web services out there that can actually help in keeping your spam at a manageable level.

for e-mails i use yahoo’s spamguard plus. it had its ups and downs when i started using it but once the program started learning from me which e-mail message is spam and which is not then my inbox started to quiet down. its still not perfect though and i get to see 2 or 3 spam mail a day. but that’s good enough considering that my bulk folder contains more than 34,000 spam messages as a write this.

i should mention that spamguard plus is only available with yahoo! webhosting and business mail service.

the standard yahoo! mail gets spamguard (no ‘plus’). that’s the version that doesn’t have the learning capability of the plus version but at least its still there. better than nothing.

for comment spam, i use askimet running with wordpress. it doesn’t catch everything and once in a while i still see one or two comment spam in the moderation queue but it does filter most of it.

the point is, its next to useless to get all worked up and get your blood pressure all ballistic about one or two unwanted e-mails/comments which may be from legit sources anyway. just mark them as spam if you don’t want them. let the software do the rest for you.

remember, its always going to be there. its a fact of internet life. you live with it, set it aside and then move on to other mundane things.

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