Dries Buytaert

It's been several months since I last updated you on Mollom's success at blocking comment spam. At the time, Mollom had just blocked its ten-millionth spam attempt and I mentioned in my post that we'd been growing fast. Indeed, in the last couple of days, we've marked a few important milestones.

Mollom has now blocked over 25 million spam attempts since Benjamin and I began this adventure ten months ago. Also as of today, we're actively protecting over 5,000 websites and we finally cracked an average efficiency of 99.9%. In other words, only 10 in 10,000 spam messages make it through our filtering. Our accuracy has gone up slowly but surely, so hitting 99.9% is an important and exciting milestone for us. We're not resting on our laurels; we think we can do even better so expect to see it climb even more.

Of course, Mollom isn't the only website protection service. Defensio made big news today with the announcement that it had been acquired by security company Websense. Sending e-mail spam is getting more and more difficult to do effectively, and the traditional security companies are probably starting to observe the increase of spammers targeting websites instead of mailboxes. Websense having Defensio in its toolbox makes sense to me.

There are only a small number of services that actively work to stem the tide of website spam, and our friends at Defensio are also fighting the good fight. I'd like to congratulate them on their acquisition, and wish them the best.