#Spam

Well, here are some stats for a longer period of time since moving to HTTPS.

So moving to HTTPS lowered the average from ~1000ish to ~200 spam comments per month (I implemented HTTPS near the end of 2011-02).

And yay, for Akismet's graphs being back. For some reason they'd been broken for ages on this blog.

Simple, start using SSL.

Not entirely sure why this keeps spambots away, but a drop from ~100 spam comments/day (1/2) to at most 4 seems pretty cool.

Edit: seems like they just do a POST request to an old URL (http://blog.tuinslak.org/some-post), which results in this reply:

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Server: nginx/0.9.4
Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2011 07:10:24 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 184
Connection: close
Location: https://blog.tuinslak.org/

I’m guessing once they rescan the new URLs they’ll be spamming again. Just a matter of time for them to update their “bookmarks”. ;)

The joy of the internet.

Google changed their Mailbox names (from Google Mail, to Gmail) so here is the update from my previous php script I made a few years ago.

Edit: Gmail reverted back to the previous version (imap folders were “Google Mail”, changed to “Gmail” yesterday and today). To version v0.03 won’t work anymore. I’m guessing this was a temporary change to implement their exchange/push-support.

1,000 spams caught, 60 legitimate comments, and an overall accuracy rate of 99.528%.

I’ve “updated” my previous php-app.

Since today I ended up getting this error:

Warning: imap_open(): Couldn't open stream {imap.gmail.com:993/imap/ssl}[Google Mail]/Spam in /home/yeri/.gmail.php on line 30
Certificate failure for imap.gmail.com: unable to get local issuer certificate: /C=US/ST=California/L=Mountain View/O=Google Inc/CN=imap.gmail.com - Connection failed.

Simply searching this line:

$open = imap_open ("{imap.gmail.com:993/imap/ssl/}$path"

And editing it to:

$open = imap_open ("{imap.gmail.com:993/imap/ssl/novalidate-cert}$path"

Solves the problem.

This will ignore the Google certificate. Please do double check that imap.google.com really points to Google, and it’s not some kind of DNS issue.

I hate having unread mail. I hate having spam. And most of all, I hate spam that asks for attention.

When receiving spam in Gmail, you get the annoying bold Spam (12353434) with ‘12353434’ being the number of unread spam messages.

With the introduction of Gmail Labs I’d hope to see an “automaticly mark spam message as seen” feature, which, well, I haven’t found yet.

Being tired of all these increasing spam numbers, and my daily efforts to “select all unread + mark as read”, I ended up writing a small PHP file which connects to the Gmail (using IMAP, so I asume you’ll need IMAP enabled in your settings..) and marks all spam messages as read. Running this script locally with a curl or cron every X time will solve most of your problems, I hope.