I just got this message when viewing my email.

“You are using this feature to spam other users. Continued misuse of Facebook’s features will result in your account being disabled. If you have any questions or concerns, you can visit our FAQ page.”

What a load of rubbish! Besides it’s hard enough to cancel your own account!

Last year a client of mine showed me a clever little tip that helps track down spammers. When signing up for things on websites, you often have to give your email address. Sadly many website owners then sell this information on for a tidy profit. One way to find out which sites are doing this is to use part of their name as your email address. For example, suppose your real email address is joe@example.com and you wanted to sign up to YouTube. You could use the email address youtube@example.com then if in a few weeks you start getting loads of spam to that address you know exactly who is responsible.

For this to work you would need to ensure your email is a “catch all” address. A catch all address redirects any emails to that domain, so you could have anything@example.com and it would get forwarded to joe@example.com

Catch all address have their own problem: spammers only need to know you domain name to start sending you spam. It’s a losing battle I am afraid! You could of course create a real email address for each and every website you sign up to, but that’s going to take ages! One solution is to have all the catch all email sent to a special inbox to keep it separate from your main email account.

I have noticed a lot of spammy comments lately, which I guess means the site is getting in all the search engines. I wish that instead of adding nonsensical comments, these spam bots would click on my ads! I am going to have to look into spam filtering on wordpress blogs. If I cant find a solution I might employ my own methods as used on some of my other sites.