workblog » Spam

Working with Qmail’s Queue

Ian — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 22:21:00 +0000

qmqtool is a great tool for viewing and changing messages in qmail’s queue. It’ll help you search for and delete spam, for instance. The FAQ has a some examples to get started with.

Relaying Qmail Through a Spam Filter

Ian — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 01:19:47 +0000

If you’re running a mail service on a web server so it can send out e-mail from contact forms, etc then you’ll want to make sure it’s relaying outbound mail through a spam filter, or it could be used to send spam if the forms get hijacked. For qmail, you just need to create /var/qmail/control/smtproutes and enter “:yourmailserver.com”, then restart. Make sure the spam filter is configured to allow the mail server to relay through it.

The Good, Bad and Ugly of SEO Methods

Ian — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 18:47:27 +0000

I agree with a lot of what Derek Powazek wrote about the SEO industry in Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists. His main gist is that the good SEO techniques — like using tags that match the semantics of the content and setting up 301 redirects when pages move — should just be considered good development practices, and that all the other crap is just polluting the web. If you want to be successful on the web, “Make something great. Tell people about it. Do it again.”

But, I do think he takes things a little too far, and makes some generaliztaions, over-simplifications and also some presuppositions about the types of sites he’s talking about. I think there are some SEO techniques that are ethical and help a site earn (not buy) a good ranking without hurting the web. So, I’ve sorted some of the most common techniques into Good, Bad and Ugly categories to help me when I’m trying to find a good SEO consultant.

The Good

Server configuration issues
Organizing and improving content
Unintuitive search engine quarks, like archived content being counted as a duplicate
Pay-Per-Click campaigns and other traditional advertising
Keyword research
Configuring Google’s Webmaster Tools
Training CMS users on good practices
Setting up 301 redirects
Pretty URLs
Not using images for text, not making the entire site in Flash
Don’t generate links with JavaScript
Using tags that are appropriate for the content

The Bad

Contrived link building schemes
Creating mini sites that link back to the real site
Paying other sites to publish articles you wrote about yourself
Buried on-site content written specifically for the search engines

The Ugly

Spam blogs
Comment spam
Duplicating content
Domain squatting
Hiding links and keywords
Google bombs
Cloaking content for search engines

Protecting Contact Forms From Spam

Ian — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 17:27:23 +0000

I’ve had several clients complain about getting spam through their contact forms. Initially, I tried checking the referrers to make sure the comments were being submitted from a browser rather than just a bot, but that didn’t help enough. Luckily, many people have created libraries for Akismet, the anti-spam service that Wordpress uses. I setup the contact form to use Bret Kuhns’ PHP4 class, which submits the comment to Akismet’s service and lets you know if it’s spam or not. There are several other libraries available, including ones for PHP5, Python, Java, Ruby on Rails and .NET2.