I was going to hold off on blogging this but since Damien has already mentioned it I thought I’d add my experience.
I received two emails directly from Monster’s Business Development Manager John Burns today. In the emails John said
i want you to delete my name from your blog that is open to the public….
He went on to add
You are putting my name at risk and my character on your blog, remove it ASAP or i will proceed with the legal advice i was given.
You have already damaged my name and caused great embarresment to me.
Please take this very seriously.
John Burns
Business Development Manager
I received several other emails from John where he tried to recall the spam he sent out yesterday but as Michele noted, that only works with Microsoft Exchange within an organisation.
To make matters even worse, incredibly, in the recall efforts John once again exposed everyone’s email addresses by not using the bcc field.
The real kicker for me though was when John left me a voicemail on the one hand threatening me with legal action, and then on the other hand asking me to
take down what you have put up about me, remove my name and replace it with somebody else’s immediately… I will definitely be taking this forward
Remove his name and replace it with somebody else’s? Just who’s name would John have me use instead?
I’m sorry but does this guy have no sense of responsibility for his actions at all. Not once, at any point did he apologise for spamming me, not once did he apologise for harvesting the data from the it@cork members’ directory and then he asks me to put someone else in the frame while he threatens me with legal action? Unbelievable.
I’m sure John is a nice guy but if he had only put his hands up, accepted he was wrong and asked how he could right what he had done, this would never have become the growing embarrassment it is to Monster’s already poor reputation.
UPDATE - Daithi has created an hilarious re-mix of the voicemail - check it out
Using .htaccess to minimise comment and referrer spam
I have been using my .htaccess file to stop comment and referrer spam on this site and it has been surprisingly successful (so far!). How do I create a .htaccess file capable of greatly reducing comment and referrer spam?
Firstly, I use Awstats to analyse visits to my site daily and I use Spam Karma to help control comment spam. Both applications give me information on spammers visiting my site.
Awstats gives me a list of the referer sites - this list contains those sites which are trying to spam my referrer logs. I monitor those sites and as new ones appear I add them to my .htaccess list in the form:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} \.domain\.tld [NC]
where .domain is the domain trying to spam my site (psxtreme, freakycheats, terashells, and so on) and the .tld is the top level domain the site is registered to (.com, .net, .org, .info, etc.).
So, for instance, in the case of the spammer coming from the smsportali.net domain, I have added the following line to my .htaccess code:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} \.smsportali\.net [NC]
This will stop accesses from all subdomains of smsportali.net (spamterm.smsportali.net) to the site and the NC ensures that this rule is case insensitive.
In the case of comment spam, I have configured Spam Karma to email me every time it deletes a spam comment - this is becoming rarer and rarer as the .htaccess file becomes more and more effective. I have configured Spam Karma to include the server variables and request headers of a comment that is not approved in the email - this is one of the configuration options of this plugin.
Scanning these emails, I can see the User Agents being employed by these spammers - armed with this information, I added the following lines to my .htaccess file:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Indy.Library [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Crazy\ Browser [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F]
and this has greatly reduced the amount of comment spam coming through.
Also, Cindy alerted me to the fact that adding:
RewriteCond %{HTTP:VIA} ^.+pinappleproxy [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F]
Will also catch a lot of the spammers.
I have a copy of my .htaccess file available for review (it is in .txt format).
NOTE:
For each set of rules in your .htaccess file, you need to finish with a RewriteRule - RewriteRule .* - [F] will give a 403 (page forbidden) to the spammers. Your last set of rules should end with RewriteRule .* - [F,L] - the L telling the RewriteEngine that this is the last line and to stop processing the rules here.
IMPORTANT WARNING:
the .htaccess file is a very unforgiving file. It has the power to make your entire site unavailable to anyone. It is strongly advised to read up on Regular Expressions and Mod_Rewrite (the Apache module which processes these commands in a .htaccess file) before creating a .htaccess file or modifying an existing one.