I’ve been get­ting tons of spam com­ments from the “bob@y####o.com” address, and I’m sure that I’m not the only Movable Type user suf­fer­ing from the same prob­lem. At one point I was get­ting a dozen a day, which is much more annoy­ing than spam e‑mail because delet­ing com­ments from MT is a lit­tle more involved than delet­ing an e‑mail. Even though I use MT-Blacklist (which has been a great help), the spam URLs, and even the IP address­es keep chang­ing. The only thing that stays the same is parts of the e‑mail address, so I wrote a very sim­ple reg­u­lar expres­sion to catch the offen­sive com­ments, because no one else seems to have post­ed one on the net:

bob@y\d*o.com

I know that it’s rather basic, but I fig­ure that I’ll adapt it when­ev­er the spam­mer starts using more com­pli­cat­ed e‑mail gen­er­a­tors. So far, the only adjust­ment has been a change from catch­ing four dig­its to catch­ing any num­ber of dig­its. It’s sat­is­fy­ing to check the activ­i­ty log and see that the black­list has caught over 500 spam com­ments over the week­end, not let­ting a sin­gle one go through.