I am getting a lot of really strange spam on my personal site, but it's unusual, there is no place for them to post and yet I am getting an odd amount of traffic from spam sties. Does anybody have any idea what this is about?

Hi Paul,

Yeah, it seems of late that mass mail spambots have gotten ahead in the spam vs. email host filtering game. I've been seeing an uptick in the last couple of months or so at my personal Comcast address. I think they're using uncommon ASCII characters to bypass string recognition of common spam phrases.

What I've been doing is forwarding my spam mail as an attachment to missed-spam[-at-]comcast.net, as this is what I've learned they have set up to handle and further investigate this stuff. It must be forwarded *as an attachment*.

Probably your email host - if not Comcast - has set up something similar.

Hope this helps!

This is not email spam, it's website traffic.

Ah yes... "links from external pages." Damn Spamish phishermen then.

You are talking in the logs in the referer field, right? I noted this a while back. It seems there are some blog engines, forums, etc that have some reporting exposed, they show the referer from hits... its seems to be an odd form of and attempt at SEO, but I noted as well that I have no such report for them to hit. I'm guessing, like ever other spammer, they don't bother to look and see who it is, they just spam.

The other bit is that if you go to the site, to see what the hell it is, they get a hit... not that there are a ton of webmasters out there, but if you chance to post a question about it, include the link and that gets bot-scanned, etc.

I swear, its a farking arms race. I wrote my own SMTP server and it they keep doing odd shit. I've seen messages with just an image (no text) so you can't scan the text for links. I've been spammed through an exploit with a bounce off NASA's servers. Its like a wack-a-mole game from hell. I finally just added a subnet blackout and I don't even open the port if the request is from africa or asia.

I have yet to see decent subnet blocking in forums... but I suspect its a growing need.

The weird thing is that a lot of times the sites don't exist.

There was a link from a reddit subpage for a member, I clicked it and the page doesn't exist.

I have looked and it appears that people can buy bot traffic, perhaps someone purchased bot traffic for my site? That seems rather odd? Or perhaps it is some attack on the server that my site is held on.

It's kind of annoying, but not that big of a problem.