I've not been posting as much lately because I'm quite busy with various things, including my upcoming e-book Uncommon AdSense. And my day job! So today's topic is not really related to AdSense, but it's something that all bloggers have to think about: spam.
A few years ago, the floodgates on my main email address were opened and I was getting literally hundreds of mails a day. I was handling it all myself, manually, but eventually it got to be too much, so I bit the bullet and nstalled SpamAssassin to deal with most of the spam.
At first I was a bit concerned that I'd lose important mail to SpamAssassin. I always try to answer questions readers of my books might have, for example, and I didn't want any of them to think I was being unresponsive. But the sheer amount of spam meant I was probably missing some of those messages anyhow, so in the end the result is probably the same.
If you have a blog whose pages have decent PR, you're probably going to face the same kind of issues with comment spam. Someone's been hitting this site hard over the last few days trying to sneak in links to their spammy sites. It's so easy to spot these that I can just delete them as soon as I get the mail from the blogging software asking me to approve the new comment. But it's also annoying. I'm wondering if I could train SpamAssassin to recognize bogus comments via the approval message and have it automatically delete the comment. Sure, I'd miss some comments this way, just like I may be missing legitimate email, but it would certainly be an elegant way to handle comment spam.
Or I could just disable comments entirely…
Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and the new e-book Uncommon AdSense.