Almost everyone hates spam (the electronic type anyway); the only exceptions being the spammers themselves and maybe the companies profiting from and/or protecting against it. Some spam fighting technologies are so effective that we may take them for granted and forget that they're actually working day in and day out protecting us from the spammers. In particular, Google's spam fighting for Google hosted email is particularly effective and easy to overlook.
We've long recommended that organizations that qualify for Google Apps free versions (once available as a free version for all users; discontinued for new accounts several years ago) and now available as the Education Edition for nonprofit organizations, including religious organizations (like churches) use it to host their email. In fact, organizations that don't qualify for free version who have a sufficiently small number of users and sufficiently large budget (about $5/month/user) should consider it as an alternative to using their website hosting accounts. The principal reasons for this recommendation are:
- Google does some of the best spam filtering available.
- Hosting email with Google (or another "outside" email provider) divorces email processing from the web hosting account. Moving a website from one hosting provider to another is relatively easy; moving email hosting from one provider to another is difficult.
Long ago, while it was still available, we moved Troutreach email processing to Google Apps Free Edition. We've never been sorry. We had also become complacent in realizing that it was doing a good job of filtering out a lot of spam generated by contact page submissions through our own website.
You're probably familiar with the adage, "the cobbler's kids go barefoot." It's certainly true for Troutreach Technologies; we'd much rather develop and maintain websites for clients than work on our own website. So, up until very recently, the "latest" version of Troutreach.com was still running Drupal 5 (for the unfamiliar, that's really old). It also relied upon relatively old technology to protect against spam sent through the Contact page; it used reCAPTCHA. Google email filtering along with reCAPTCHA did a pretty good job of stopping spam for more years than we'd like to admit.
Recently we began seeing more and more spam email messages getting through the defenses provided by reCAPTCHA and Google. We ignored it as long as we could before coming to the conclusion that something had to be done, even if I wasn't ready to put up the new site (in Drupal 7).
Mollom is a very effective spam fighting service. They offer several levels of protection starting with a free subscription that is adequate for most small organizations. We've recommended them to our clients for years. Naturally we'd use their service on our new website, along with other techniques.
Now, however; it was time to put Mollom to use on the old Troutreach website. Installation was easy, not Drupal 7 easy, but easy nonetheless. The next day we wondered how effective it was so we looked at the statistics. In less than two days it had blocked over 200 attempted spam submissions; in less than three days that number had soared to over 800. Perhaps more important, NO spam messages bypassed Google, and, it is likely that no spam messages were even presented to Google.
We continue to recommend Mollom to our clients and have begun installing another spam mitigation tool, honeypot, as part of a belt and suspenders approach to mitigating spam.
Update: 8 Days Later
A quick check of the statistics indicated that almost 4000 spam submissions have been blocked. Thank you, Mollom!