Marshall Kirkpatrick’s post about the amount of spam getting thru his Gmail filter – 19 of 26 emails were spam – has a comment from blogging buddy, Jeremiah, that reminded me of an issue I’ve noticed with Akismet.
While Jeremiah’s finding Akismet to be reliable, I’m finding it to be less so. With the number of comments increasing on Marketing Pilgrim, I’m thankful for the spam filtered out by Akismet, but I’m having to spend too much time “de-spamming” false positives.
This was magnified with the Digging of a recent article, resulting in many comments. I found many legitimate comments appearing in Akismet – including some from people who had commented before – and I had to manually de-spam them, often the same person multiple times.
It’s become impossible to simply let Akismet do its thing and trust that it’s not falsely flagging comments as spam.
If anyone knows of a better solution, I’m all ears. In the meantime, here’s what Akismet needs (especially the WordPress plugin).
- Manually enter trusted IPs or email addresses.
- Include my own list of trigger words to prevent spam that still gets past Akismet
- Sort and filter options for viewing flagged spam. Let me sort by email, name, IP etc, so I can find “friendly” comments a lot easier.
So while Marshall is having problems with Gmail – it’s doing fine for me, although 3 of the past 12 emails were spam – and Jeremiah is happy with Akismet, I’m certainly finding it to be straining at the seams.
Anyone else finding an increase in false positives, or more spam getting through? Any other features you’d like to see added? Perhaps you have a better solution for spam than Akismet – I’m all ears.
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Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world’s most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.
You can read his internet marketing blog at Marketing Pilgrim and reach him at andy.beal@gmail.com.
