I use thunderbird for reading my email. Most of the moderation notification, or even comment notifications for new comments which are spam are marked correctly as spam by the spamassassin on my mail server, and as junk mail by my Thunderbird.
Just this morning I was thinking of how neat it would be if I could use SpamAssassin, or something like Thunderbird’s Junk Mail Filter to deal with comment spam on my blogs.
Looks like someone’s heard my prayer after all. Mark releases the Three Strikes Plugin and explains the rationale behind it :
This plugin is designed to prevent comment spam from even hitting your system and leaving you with a flood of approval requests and a bunch of comments to be deleted. While dealing with some moderated comments on my system, I started to realize that most of the REAL Spam could easily be categorized as delete fodder by a “fuzzy” points system. In toying with the idea and testing the various scenarios, I have put together a plugin that keeps tracks of the “strikes” of a comment and then prevents the comment from ever getting into your database and making more work for you.
Kind of like how SpamAssassin assigns scores. Very neat, and of course, if I know Mark well enough, he won’t stop here - he’ll make it a lot better, if need be. I can see how a whitelist with trusted IPs, URLs and authors can be a useful addition.
The best spam filter would be one that makes sure you never get to see the spam, or know that someone spammed you, so you don’t waste any time dealing with spam.
