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Ok maybe the title is a little harsh? I hate spammers with a passion. If it’s not online drugs, it’s casinos or fake banking site phishing for details. I don’t usually write about the random junk I get but this email stuck out. Did you know Microsoft had a consumer award of which you can win a cool half mill? I don’t believe for one minute that anyone would take such a thing seriously? This reminds me of the 419 eater site which tempts me to setup a temp email address and fire something back to this...

For the last 4 months I have noticed the amount of referrer spam increase on my friends website that I help with now and again. Referrer spam isn't new and has been about for years. With sophisticated technologies arising to protect our email inboxes/blog comments/ping backs, spammers need to use every other way possible to lure "a victim". For anyone not familiar with this type of spam: Referrer spam is a kind of spamdexing (spamming aimed at search engines). The technique involves making repeated web site requests using a fake referrer url that points to the site the spammer wishes...

There are blogging engines/CMS's out there that have built-in functionality to prevent or certainly reduce the amount of spam being pushed on to a site via comments/trackbacks or from a contact form. If your not using software that prevents these invasions then there are free components out there you should be able to integrate very easily or you can implement some simple methods.

It's always a good day when one step further is taken to combat spam. This is when browsing the BBC's website I came across the following article  - Backing for tool to battle spam Lets hope that ISPs and Companies can offer a common element like this so that we can prevent these unwelcomed emails. In many cases it's due to insecure mail servers that have "relay email" enabled, virus/trojan infection, spammers using applications that has it's own email engine or even abusing there own ISP's email server. Not a day goes by without my old freeserve account being spammed. 60ish emails...