An anti spam review about zerospam. Email spam stopping is rather essential as the fight to stop spam is never ending, and can waste many hours if not treated properly. Spam comes in a number of forms, including email spam, and blog and forum comment spam.

I have used http://www.zerospam.co.nz to reduce the amount of spam coming into my email box. I set the mx records so that the email was sent directly to ZeroSpam, who then filtered it before delivering it to me. Spam that originates from overseas is received by the ZeroSpam overseas servers, so that it does not even hit New Zealand. About 27% of all email I receive is good email, it reports. Over 15000 spams emails in the last month.

Spam emails originate from a number of places

• whois records – I have specific domains@ email addresses for some of my domains, and so can see when whois is being used as a source for spam
• mailto links on websites – personally I obfuscate most of these with javascript encrypters.
• even just plain text emails on web pages can be picked up by the bots. Copies of emails and email addresses shown on Google groups and Google code can also be picked up by the bots

You also need some form of blog spam stoppers. For my forums, I manually approve all posts, and so cull most of the posts that are containing links, and for the purpose of linking rather than contributing on the forum. WordPress has the akismet plugin that has recently gone a lot more commercial. A good alternative is the Growmap’s “http://www.growmap.com/growmap-anti-spambot-plugin/”>WordPress Anti Spam bot (GASP) free wordpress plugin.

The fight against spam is certainly never ending, and consumes a vast amount of resources in antispam programs, and in time and bandwidth wasting.