How Do I Configure MT-Blacklist to Block a Specific E-Mail Address?

June 14, 2004 6:36 PM

MT-Blacklist question. I find it to be an incredibly great tool. So far, I've only ever gotten MT spam from one source. The email address is always the same: "[e-mail]," but because of MT-Blacklist's focus on using the linked-to content as the badge of spam, it only catches about half of these. Is there any way I can configure MT-Blacklist to refuse all comments submitted with this email address? It would seem simple enough... but I can't figure out how.
posted by scarabic to computers & internet (8 comments total)

Hey scarabic -- I've gotten PLENTY of comment-spam from "hrie" too -- and I just added the whole address to my MT-Blacklist: [e-mail]. Seems to work.
posted by davidmsc at 8:53 PM on June 14, 2004

Blocking by email adddress is built into MT3, if you want to try that. You can also require people to sign in to comment in MT3 if you want, but MT-Blacklist doesn't run on MT3 yet.
posted by anildash at 8:53 PM on June 14, 2004

I haven't tried adding the email address as a regexp to block on, but I have found the most recent version of MT-Blacklist will let you do arbitrary searches on the supplied email addresses.

This means each time I get spammed by hrie@yahoo I can easily check to see whether there's been spate of posting to the other blogs hosted on the same MT install.
posted by John Shaft at 9:31 PM on June 14, 2004

Damn "hrie" mofo. Who the hell is this jackass?

I thought I had added the address stright into to my blacklist but now I don't see it in there. I'll try again. Probably user error.

Thanks for the tip, Anil. I think that's a good compliment to the IP blocking in v2. I'm going to delay upgrading for a while, though. I'm just getting up to speed on v2 (and loving it!).
posted by scarabic at 9:46 PM on June 14, 2004

If I find hrie, I will kill him/them. First, though, I will make him read my entire blog, including all of the blog spam he/they posted before MT-Blacklist deleted it all. Then he will want to die.
posted by vraxoin at 10:39 PM on June 14, 2004

Also, if you haven't updated your list from MT-Blacklist, do that--the list blocked all of hrie's URLs out of the box when I downloaded it about a week and a half ago.
posted by vraxoin at 10:40 PM on June 14, 2004

Just to confirm davidmsc's suggestion above -- you can add [e-mail] to the blacklist manually, and it won't accept anymore spam from that email address no mo'.
posted by John Shaft at 3:47 AM on June 15, 2004

I'm just relieved to know that I wasn't the only guy plagued by this spammer. That said, though, it did occasionally spit out some oddly neat truisms, like "Imitiation is the sincerest form of television".
posted by codger at 12:03 PM on June 15, 2004