It seems that something or someone found a hole one in one of my Wordpress installs and started sending out spam early this morning. My host then shut me down completely and this site was suspended for several hours on Sunday because I was spamming.

We are back up and running now but not out of the woods. I sincerely apologize to anyone who feels that I spammed them.  I didn’t.  I don’t really know what happened but I HOPE it’s all better now.

It seems that StumbleUpon can connect to your Gmail account and auto-magically connect you with those that have StumbleUpon accounts. I thought that was cool so I did it. I didn’t realize that it was also sending invites to all those in my address book that weren’t on StumbleUpon.

Since I have 419 random emails in Gmail, I feel I just spammed hundreds of people. SORRY!! I didn’t mean to.

It seems that a number of those emails were to support sites so I just opened up quite a few support tickets too. Crap.

I’ve been doing a lot of spam research lately and trying to figure out why certain email messages were being tagged as [Spam] in the subject line and others weren’t. Now, this isn’t your typical spam, it’s legit emails and ones that shouldn’t be marked. All the obvious items were checked into and no issues were found. No pills were sold, no unsuspecting targets, but the issue remained.

My main issue was with SpamAssassin. I know that it was tagging the subject of a lot of emails with [Spam] and I wanted to know why. They only thing I could really come up with was that those that were marked had FORGED_RCVD_HELO in the header source. But what does that mean?

YouTube has long been the goto place to find anything you missed from TV, or just to watch things you’d never see on TV. However, lately, it just seems like it’s being spammed more and more.

In this example, I searched for Carrie Underwood and got a bit of spam instead.

Since YouTube is owned by Google, you’d think they could detect this. Tons of keywords strung together should be pretty easy to detect. Or what about noticing that a video is tagged with nude or porn but it’s not marked as adult? How hard would it be to detect that? Or what about videos that have the same title, same description, same running time and that were uploaded at the same time? Can we say duplicate content? It seems Google’s SEO rules are not in play at YouTube.

I’ve installed two new plugins that are Ajax based.

Ajax Comments
Great plugin that takes the refresh out of adding a comment to the site. It simply accepts the comment and adds it to the list without ever changing screens.

Ajax LiveSearch
This replaces my default search box with a live search box. Start typing and it’ll automatically show you results. I think it has IE issues, but works great in most browsers.

I also had to get rid of Spam Karma and go for Akismet as Spam Karma and Ajax Comments didn’t play well together. Either way, I should have excellent spam protection.

There are some great blog search engines out there today like Technorati, Google Blog Search and Sphere. However, they all have the same flaw; they don’t block spam blogs.

Not one of the three blog search engines listed above do a very good job, if any job at all, of blocking blog spam. Do a search for some sports gear, like “wrestling shoes”, and there is a great probability that more than a few results in the top ten are spam blogs.