Everyone has spam problems, this we know. But what are you doing to combat spam? I rarely get spam onto my computer due to the various walls I put up around it/me. There is spam we know about and spam we don't until it happens to us.

Email Spam Filters
Well I have Spam Assassin running on the server where my web sites are hosted. I used to check the spam before deleting it but now I can't be bothered and just set it to auto delete! I also have around 50 email filters set up on the server. If the subject line contains a particular word then bin it. I won't list the words here, I'm sure the imagination can give you an idea

When I check my email I don't check it through Outlook or PocoMail (the two apps I use), I check it through Mailwasher Pro which is probably the best piece of software you could buy. At around £20 ($37) it's fantastic. Why? Well first off it's dead cheap, always a good point. That aside, it picks up most spam straight off, it's very flexible as you can check all emails first or just auto delete. It has a friends list and a blacklist to help build up a library of email addresses, and it also tends to spot viruses (if they get through my server's virus checkers that is!). You can read the email content on the server too which means if it's email you'd delete off your machine anyhow eg. just the daily news, then read it online and delete it there and then. Why? Well whilst you could download it and then delete it surely it would just be better removing it straight from the server. Same with spam. Most hosts nowadays provide a Web Mail facility, which could be used in a similar manor to Mailwasher Pro however you can only check one account at a time and it's often not that quick. I have around 8 accounts being checked with one click of the button.

Of course if anything does happen to get through (usually me missing it on MW) and into Outlook or Poco, both have great junk mail checkers built in too. But I'd personally prevent it from even touching my machine first.

Referrer Spam
Okay this is more the reason for this post but I figured I'd add my 2p to the above issues whilst I was at it. Checking my stats for this site keeps throwing up a lot of referrer spam. So what is Referrer Spam? Referrer spam is where you start to get various spam web sites in your list of referring sites. However when you go to see where they've linked to you they haven't. They're usually using a piece of software to spoof the referrer and start pinging various sites, often blogs. Most web site statistics are kept hidden to the public and only available by entering in login details however some statistics are left for anyone to see them. If you search on certain phrases in a search engine you'll find plenty of indexed stats for various web sites. These public stats will then show the list of referrers which of course are then indexed as a link back to the web site by the spiders. Another reason is because some people apparently have a dynamic link to show the last referrer to their web site on the front page, so again pushing their link to the spiders and human visitors. However this spam is annoying as it distorts your statistics. Whether each referral is counted as a visitor I don't know, I can only presume it is as looking in my raw logs there is an entry for one.

So how to prevent this? Well after viewing around 150-200 spam referrers in my stats for February today I decided to do a quick search on Yahoo and found an article from SpywareInfo. Read the full article if you want to know more however in a nutshell you can use .htaccess on Apache (if hosted on Apache) to prevent these spammers from getting their referrers into your stats. To do this you need to open up .htaccess on your server and add the following:

# Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?spammersite1.com.*$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?spammersite2.com.*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?spammersite3.com.*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?spammersite4.com.*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?spammersite5.com.*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?spammersite6.com.*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?spammersite7.com.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.*$ http://www.some-other-website.com [R,L]

note the line "RewriteEngine On" only needs to be in your .htaccess once, so if you've used it previously in this file then remove that line. Of course with the above all you need to do is replace each "spammersiteX.com" with the site address you want to block referrering. The last line will then redirect to any web site of your choosing. Alternatively you could use

RewriteRule .* – [F,L]

Which will return a Forbidden page.

Blog Spam
Lastly I've noticed on referrer who has reached over 100 hits in my referrer list. I've checked out the site at http://www.spagack.com (note the lack of linkage there) and it seems to sell a piece of software that will automatically spam blogs. This is most likely the software that's being used on my blog. Of course I have all comments set to be moderated at first post so unless you're a regular commentor you'll be moderated first. However of course it's still annoying to see, but I've also blocked this URL too so I'm hoping that perhaps they'll take me out of their software and just leave me alone.