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.

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”. ;)

Anyway, here's the Akismet screenshot:

Pretty cool, no ?

Totals can be found here.

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.

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’ve updated the 1st version, that ignores the certificate.

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.

Download the file here (phps) or here (txt).

Or just copy paste it!

< ?php
/*
Gmail "spam mark-as-read"

by Tuinslak
www.tuinslak.be

v0.01 :: 26/08/2008 . init php codez
*/

// Config starts here

// Gmail user & pass
$user = "YOU";
$pass = "hiddensecretz";

// Debugging - Outputs a list of mailboxes and status on the imap server (1/0)
$listmailbox = 0;

// Advanced config :o

// "Path" of the (spam) mailbox and/or its name.
// default should be ok with Gmail.
$path = "[Google Mail]/Spam";

// End of config

$open = imap_open ("{imap.gmail.com:993/imap/ssl}$path", $user, $pass, "", 1) or die(imap_last_error() . "

Connection failed.");

// debug
if($listmailbox) {
        echo "<strong>Mailboxes:";
        $folders = imap_listmailbox($open,  "{  Gmail  }", "*");

        if ($folders == false) {
                echo "Call failed\n";
        } else {
                foreach ($folders as $val) {
                        echo $val . "\n";
                }
        }

        echo "</strong><strong>Status</strong>:";
        $status = imap_status($open, "{imap.gmail.com}$path", SA_ALL);
        if ($status) {
                echo "Messages:   " . $status->messages    . "\n";
                echo "Recent:     " . $status->recent      . "\n";
                echo "Unseen:     " . $status->unseen      . "\n";
                echo "UIDnext:    " . $status->uidnext     . "\n";
                echo "UIDvalidity:" . $status->uidvalidity . "\n";
        } else {
                echo "imap_status failed: " . imap_last_error() . "\n";
        }
}

// Mark as read
$search = imap_search($open, 'UNSEEN');
// print out the array containing $search info
//print_r($search);

for ($i = 0; $i < sizeof($search); $i++) {
        $read = imap_setflag_full($open, $search[$i], '\\Seen');
}

// and close it down !
imap_close($open);

// EOF
?>

If you plan to execute it from shell, don’t forget to add a shebang “#!/usr/bin/php” on line 1 and chmod +x gmail_spamreader.php.

Edit: Please add a comment if you’re using it, just for statistics. :)