I was getting comment spam, with some of the ‘filter blocking’ text being rather offensive. I was tired of this one IP hitting me with garbage (it wasn’t posted live on my site due to WordPress‘ excellent filtering of comments) so I did something about it. I looked up his ISP from within the warning email, found out what email address they used to get reports of abuse and emailed them. About 2 hours later I got an email saying that they’d temporarily blocked the IP address until further investigation. Woo-Hoo! The comment spam stopped. Thanks for the great tools Matt and Kitty!

The heart of the issue is that we often, as web site owners, don’t take time to let ISP‘s know that they’re hosting these spammers. If we let them know they might do something, thus either forcing spammers to greater lengths to achieve their goals or to stop them in their tracks. Spammers are not good clients for ISPs because usually they smudge their name. I officially dub October 2nd “Can Spam Day” [somebody buy that domain :)]! On that day, take 5 minutes to find a comment spammer’s IP address and then email the ISP to warn them of abuse.