I just started using Pidgin as my client and decided to get in touch with all my readers who want to talk to me, so I have also been advertising my IM handles openly. I didn’t know this kind of spam existed, as Mark from Make Use Of says, this means dozens of spam messages eventually.

I immediately felt at ease with Pidgin, since he also showed a great way to stop this spam, using a plugin called Bot Sentry. It forces people not on your contact list to answer a question you specify before they can send you a message.

This is such a simple, but very effective way to stop these messages. A simple question like “Write down every second letter from these characters: aIsmmalwneaslogmde” will keep away bots for a while.

I knew it existed, but I was only faced with it truly when I started writing my blog. There is a kind of spam that I think is a bit annoying, but acceptable. These are the people who own a company or web service, and go around on people’s blogs, writing quasi-useful comments with their link inside.

First of all, it is not really good netiquette to include your link in forums, or comments. It may also get filtered if a blog has a very aggressive spam filtering system. Second of all, you can enter your website in the form, and if someone likes your comment, they can click on your name and whoosh, they’re at the site. The goal would be to write an interesting enough comment.

However, I am prepared to accept “spam” like this, that is at leas half relevant. I wrote a post on managing your tasks with Remember the Milk a while ago, and recently approved the following comment:

“The logo is cute - no doubt
I was using the service untill I realized I needed something more. Now I’m with Wrike.com [http://www.wrike.com/]. It’s a very cool project management service.”

I can’t say 100% that this is spam, but I’m pretty sure, since Wrike is a pay for application. It’s also not exactly a substitute for Remember the Milk, but, it is similar. I also like the fact that the commenter actually read some of the post. I really-really dislike spam, but comments like this are acceptable, since they show you alternatives.

If you have a service you want to promote it’s fine posting a comment in every blog I think, but at least make the effort to contribute to the subject at hand. If you do, I think you should be ok, even if you put in your link, I mean I understand that services need traffic. If y”our product is really bad, no amount of traffic will save you anyway.

A type of troublesome email I’ve seen recently is fake Hallmark e-card emails. If you get one, be sure to hover over the link to the card itself. In the email I received, the link points to “http://62.183.68.110/card.exe”, hardly a legit Hallmark card.

If you get anything that isn’t directly from someone you know, or doesn’t contain any very specific info about the sender, always take care with clicking links. Even if you do click this Hallmark one, you still have to choose to save or run it, if you accidentally run into this, just cancel and you should be ok.

I wanted to contact Hallmark about this, but in the process it became clear that they know about the problem, so in the end I didn’t submit my email. Good job Hallmark for noticing and doing something, I hope they manage to accomplish something.