Readers and writers blog

The spam count in the comment section of this website has suddenly dropped from dozens per day to barely a handful in the past week. And we don’t know why.

Did the spam filter in our WordPress platform or in our Yahoo email account suddenly start working better? Or was it the emails we sent to several of the vendors listed in the spam?

Or was it the FBI?

It’s doubtful the electronic filters are now working any better than they had been. And we’re not confident that our emails to the vendors could account for the precipitous decline in spam.

We should say that one of the vendors, Toyota, was pretty attentive to a heads-up we sent in early September advising them that Heritage Toyota in South Burlington, Vt., was listed in a spam comment we had received. We said that we didn’t think the corporation was involved but that possibly an Internet advertiser, maybe working indirectly for an unknowing dealership, was padding its hit count by spamming and thus overcharging somebody for advertising. In a series of emails, Toyota said it checked further but couldn’t find anything.

The previous month, we had sent a similar heads-up to State Farm Insurance about its name appearing in our comment spam. They thanked us for our “comments and suggestions” and said they were passing along “this useful information” for review. End of discussion. We weren’t surprised. It was State Farm who screwed a bunch of southern California homeowners after a huge fire four years ago. The homeowners originally bought ‘full replacement’ coverage, but the company later switched it to ‘extended replacement,’ which sounded even better but in reality was much less coverage.

You know, insurance companies are screwing this entire country left and right. They collect ever-increasing premiums and what they don’t siphon off as profits is spent hiring cadres of people to deny or delay claims of customers who don’t have the money or time to sue them. You want to privatize Medicare and put it in the hands of people like this? No thanks, we’ll take cadres of bureaucrats in Washington who may be slow, inefficient and even stupid, but they’re not crooks.

But we digress.

Spam — not the canned meat, of course, but the unsolicited commercial email — can be generated by computers by the millions at practically no cost, looking for just one recipient to bite. Most recipient computers have their own programs to filter out this stuff, but the problem with comment spam is that most of it starts with a comment.

Most of ours were headed by Greek names like Aristotelis, Spiridon, Christodoulos, Alexiou. It reminded us of the spammer’s dodge of using letters from the Greek alphabet that look like English letters and spell out a product or message but slip past the content-based filters because they make no sense.

All our comment spam started with a comment — usually one word like ‘nice’ or ‘cool’ — and then drifted into ads for cars, drugs, porn. Not all came under Greek names. For example, we were told, ‘Your site is great,’ by a sender named Big Butt Milf (’milf’ is an acronym for ‘mothers I’d like to f—’). And ‘Wow! Thanks!’ was a note of encouragement we received not only from Double Penetration but also from Huge Double Penetration.

And some of it was just gibberish — nothing but a series of recursive links, like somebody’s spam program had a nervous breakdown.

And now for the FBI.

It wasn’t WordPress comment spam that we emailed the FBI about. It was an email via Yahoo from someone claiming to be the ‘Bank of America’ saying they were updating their accounts and needed all our bank numbers — pins, accounts, etc. — and other personal information. Since we’re not Bank of America customers, we thought the FBI would like to know at their tips website. We did this advisedly, because this is the same site where you can report ’suspected terrorism.’ And we think this government’s ‘anti-terrorism’ program is a bunch of crap run by rightwing political operatives.

But our comment spam is down to a trickle.

You know, it wasn’t difficult dealing with all that spam. Just approve the legitimate comments, then a couple of clicks to mass-delete the rest.

So who’s doing it now?

– Sid Leavitt