Several anti-spam systems protect the blog and discussion forum on my web site. A ".htaccess" file blocks specific parts of the Internet completely. (There's really no benefit to me in getting page views from China and Russia; people there are unlikely to be spending money at my web site.) The few IP addresses still getting spam through the .htaccess filter are mostly hacked home cable/DSL accounts — impractical to block by IP, but as I found, quite easy to stop through other methods. The blog itself has Spam Karma to detect and deflect spam.

On 21 November, 2009 I added a new line of defense that blocks the dumbest spammers without even needing to connect with a database (like Spam Karma, Akismet, etc.). I won't describe it except to say it's so simple I didn't think it would work. Amazingly, it does: some spammers are so pathetic that the simplest safeguards keeps them out.

The idiot kalobonaro@gmail.com (now posting as bromenaro@gmail.com and kuchkonaru@gmail.com) hit my blog for weeks without noticing his messages never got through. oeeleoojuf@gmail.com at least noticed that his spams weren't getting posted... but the log file shows he was spamming manually, checking to see if it went live... and then trying again manually when he saw it failed! asdfwerjxx@gmail.com had the same M.O. Definitely future Darwin Award-winners.

These aren't the spammers blocked by Spam Karma, these are the ones who couldn't even get that far: The dumbest of the dumb. They do provide one benefit: They provide me with IP addresses to block. Thanks, guys!

Note that the email addresses shown are those provided by the spammers: They may belong to innocent third parties or may be completely fictitious. They only thing we can know for certain is that the spammers claimed these were their email addresses. Many, but not all, of the sending IP addresses are now blocked, but the ones shown below still comprise just a small part of what's in my .htaccess file.