When Spam Filtering Is Too Smart

February 28th, 2007

One of the main reasons I use Gmail is because of the great spam filtering. In fact while I was at work today it automatically stopped 1055 spam emails from getting to my inbox. (yes, I really get that many spam emails / day sent to me…. It’s what happens when you list your email address in the whois info for 40 some domain names)

Anyway, I learned a valuable lesson today: Check that spam box from time to time.

I just opened it up and saw that there were almost 200 contact form messages from one of my websites waiting in the junk email.

But how?

It seems that some bots have been spamming my contact form with links. This started a couple months ago and I tolerated it. For every 2 real contact forms I’d have 1 full of spammy links to porn sites. I wrote it off as part of making yourself available on the web. (maybe I should have put a captcha on it, but I hate those things.)

Anyway, this same bot is most likely spamming other people who (unlike me) report it to Gmail with that “spam” button. I may have unconsiously submitted a few as well.

It would seem though, that since all my contact form emails have the same subject and from address, that Gmail started putting them all in the spam box. Whoops!

So, if you’ve sent in a contact form for freetext.biz in the last month, I just spent the last 2 hours replying to them all. Check your email.

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