Akismet says: 15,309 spam comments blocked since I first installed it, about 9 months ago. 2 false positives that I’ve had to deal with.
GMail says: well not a lot cumulatively, but it’s been around 50 a day lately. Over two years, averaging at 25 spam/day, that’s 13,250 emails I haven’t had to deal with. Only one false positive that I can recall.
Assuming 10 seconds to deal with something like that, that’s about 80 cumulative hours I’ve saved. So if you don’t have Akismet or an effective mail filtering service…
… yeah, just thought I’d say that.
I’m still undecided about Akismet. After a month of running it, I’ve had 3 false positives out of a possible 11 total. Not only that, but it doesn’t send any email like regular WordPress moderation does. (I’m sure there’s an option somewhere?)
GMail is great. I’ve been getting a few false negatives lately but they’re trivial to deal with. I get about 20 a day and so far in the past 2 years or something I’ve gotten 2 false positives.
Another great one is SpamSieve for the Mac. Detects spam brilliantly after minimal training.
Well the count is up to 15,598 today, so that goes to show for me it’s effective. What I think really made the difference was the “Discard on Posts older than 30 days”, because that’s meant my validation queue is down to maybe 5 a week. I think they had it at one point, but after getting 40 moderation emails a day I switched it off – maybe a daily digest wasn’t a bad idea.
Most of the stuff that slips through Gmail these days is the phishing style stuff, and the occasional lottery notice. They learn quickly enough, though.
But yeah, having worked on the techniques that are used to identify this kinda stuff (the work I did at uni over the summers), I’m pretty impressed with how the filters progress and get better.