a wonderful spam by jennifer lancey.

WordPress has a spam-guard called Akismet to detect (automatic) spam comments to your blog entries. I occasionally check the spam-queue to see whether any legitimate comments have been marked as spams. Since Akismet learns with user feedback, it has been doing a wonderful job of separating spam from valid comments so far. A typical spam looks as below:

homeowner insurance quotes | urlser.com/?aBCA5#0

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Today, I found the following comment tagged as a possible spam:

Jennifer Lancey | why-outsource.com

Hello there. I was sent a link to your blog by a friend a while ago. I have been reading a long for a while now. Just wanted to say HI. Thanks for putting in all the hard work.

Jennifer Lancey

The first reaction was a surprise, second one was to think of possible technical pitfalls in Akismet (thanks to the spam-detection project done during Information Retrieval course at IITB), and the third one was an urge to click on De-spam.

Somewhere inside, to which we call conscience, asked me, why Akismet, which has been doing a good job, would suddenly tag this good comment as a spam. I set back and did a google search for Jennifer Lancey why outsource. I found the same comment at various blogs! Importantly, it has been tagged as a legitimate comment by all the bloggers!

I was impressed by this Jennifer.

Tags: spams, jennifer lancey, legitimate spam, akismet, whyoutsource, blog spam