Yes, the site is now back from the dead. For now. The folks at my host finally realized that I was not the one who was sending thousands of spam e-mails and revived my site. Damn, but it was a long wait…I was suffering withdrawals. Sure, I visited all of my other regular sites, and posted a few entries at my other blogs, but with BLTB, it just felt as if I had no “base.” I was using NetVibes as my temporary default home page, which was adequate. Nifty service, that NetVibes. But I feel *so* much better now that BLTB is back on the air.

better living through blogging bltb site spam

My apologies for the site being down lately…somehow, my domain is being used to send thousands of e-mails to people I’ve never heard of, and my host (Cedant.com) automatically shuts down my site if more than 500 e-mails are sent within 30 minutes…and the bounce-back of undeliverable e-mails to my GMail account was piling up at over 1,000 per hour. Does that make sense? In other words, someone/thing is sending out massive amounts of e-mails using addresses such as “ElaineBSmith” and “warrenGharding” — sending them to thousands of addresses that I’ve never heard of. And many of those sent e-mails are being bounced back to my account as undeliverable. Double-whammy.

I contacted Cedant and said that I have no idea what’s happening, and asked them for any tips on how to fix whatever the problem is…but haven’t heard back from them in over 24 hours. I guess one of their techies took a little pity on me and turned my site back on (at least for now). If any of you smarter-than-me folks have any ideas, please let me know!

Oh, and I’m also pissed off because I received a Breaking News e-mail alert at work yesterday from CNN. Breaking news, huh? Let’s see…terrorist attacks? North Korean missiles? Death of a major political figure? Severe storm outbreak? Nope. The *breaking news* alert was for Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown divorce. Un-freaking-believable.

cedant e mail spam

After wrestling with Spam Karma over at Big Sky Blog (and having would-be commenters frustrated by “SQL barf”), and never receiving an API key to activate Akismet, I went in search of another spam-busting tool and found this nifty one: Did You Pass Math? The plug-in requires only one file and then one-click activation; it then adds a very simple math question (such as 2 + 4) to the comment form. If you enter the correct answer, your comment is posted. If you don’t answer - or answer incorrectly - your comment doesn’t get posted. And it doesn’t require any captcha-specific files or fonts! So go ahead - leave a comment here, and let’s see if you passed math class!

Bloggify comment spam did you pass math spam wordpress