Everyday we get thousands of spam trackbacks, pingbacks, and comments here on our site. Since we’re powered by WordPress we use an amazing plugin called Akismet that stops spammers cold in their tracks. It wasn’t until the other day that I realized how crazy it would be if there were little or no spam protection on all the blogs out there.
I ventured over to Akismet’s stat section where they posted the graph you see above. All of the bright orange is, you guessed it, spam! The graph contains data from the past 2 years, where it has gone from nothing to a lot of something. Oh, and the little blue section down at the bottom are legitimate comments. Their stats indicate that 92% of all comments are spam…wow!
What’s even more sad is that blog spam isn’t nearly as bad as email spam. It’s estimated that over 90% of emails sent everyday are spam, which equates to about 100 billion emails. That number is up from 30 billion emails in 2005. 
As I write this my Gmail account sits with 166 spam messages (correctly filtered) from the last day alone, and for me no more than one of these messages makes its way past the Gmail filters every week. And Akismet keeps the comments on our site clean, so that when you want to leave a message you don’t have to scroll past comments offering to sell you prescription drugs at a discounted price.
I think this is an appropriate time to say thank you to all of the companies who provide excellent spam protection.
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Even if it is a little TOO protective sometimes… I have to agree.
Sometimes it is too protective, and I wish there was someway for us to create a whitelist, but there isn’t. Fortunately it keeps our comments squeeky clean otherwise people wouldn’t even want to comment in the first place.