Spam, TurboMail, and life without setuptools...
08 Oct 2006
One can get quite used to life with setuptools. While developing and deploying gibe, the install_requires setting in setup.py has come to be my friend, ensuring that everything I need is installed in the environment I'm working in. But when investigating anti-spam options after the twenty or so spam messages overnight, I suddenly realised that there is a scary world without eggs.
Two options showed up in the Cheese Shop - spambayes and akismet Python API.
I'd used spambayes before, adding it to my vellum install to reduce spam. So, I just popped it into install_requires and reran python setup.py develop to get it installed. But there was no egg package available for setuptools. It felt a lot like culture shock. Anyway, I didn't give up immediately, and found out I could store the spam information in the RDBMS. But then I decided to see what else there was.
I'd heard of akismet before - I saw it on the KnowledgeTree People blogs that use WordPress, but I went with moderation on those instead. But since akismet keeps itself automatically up to date and I just felt like trying something different, I figured it was worth a shot. Again, no egg file. Thankfully, it is just a single file, though, and that means I can just bundle it, and things will work on a from-scratch Python environment (since I've been using virtual-python extensively lately).
Anyway, akismet has so far prevented 10 or so spam messages in the past few hours. I know, because I've also integrated TurboMail, which now notifies me on all comments, whether they pass the spam test or not. Besides a typo that prevents message delivery (who cares about that aspect of mail?), deployment with setuptools was flawless - just a simple easy_install of my updated gibe package.
Of course, now I need to figure out how I can send patches to the akismet and spambayes people to get them egged-up.
9 old-style comments
Michael Foord — October 08, 2006 at 11:31 PM.
Jacques Marneweck — October 09, 2006 at 12:01 AM.
Neil Blakey-Milner — October 09, 2006 at 05:18 PM.
Akismet now at 92 spam mails detected, with only a single one getting through. I'm impressed...
Phillip J. Eby — October 09, 2006 at 06:42 PM.
Neil Blakey-Milner — October 09, 2006 at 10:17 PM.
That's incredibly irritating - and I didn't get a copy of the message via email or a notification of your post now. No trackbacks in the logs to show why the mails weren't sent either.
I think I'm going to have to ask the guy who wrote the software for my money back.
Did you get the "marked as spam" message, or a generic CherryPy error message? I'm intrigued. And why does this message show up?
Fuzzyman — October 09, 2006 at 10:21 PM.
Neil Blakey-Milner — October 09, 2006 at 10:28 PM.
Well, of the ones that got through TurboMail to me, all of them. It seems TurboMail got a bit stuck a while back, though, and stopped even trying to deliver mail (and another three spam messages got through, and who knows how many false positives...). Restart, and now I have notifications again (such as, for your post).
Ah well, beta software can never be called boring...
Phillip J. Eby — October 09, 2006 at 10:29 PM.
I got a reload of this page, with a blurb at the top saying something like "comment considered spam".
This was after I tried to post the same comment last night, and got a 500 error with no explanation. So I waited until today and tried posting it again, and got the spam message, following which the edit box was cleared, so I gave up and posted the comment above.
Alice McGregor — November 07, 2007 at 10:42 AM.
I've added your site to TurboMail's wiki welcome page. Any comments on your usage/integration of TurboMail?
— Alice.