When it comes to dealing with blog spam, there is no shortage of tools. Blogger comes with a built-in Google crafted tool, WordPress has Akismet (and Akismet is also available for Movable Type, Drupal, Expression Engine and tons of others), Defensio and others, Drupal has Mollom, and so on. Now Six Apart, the company behind Movable Type, TypePad and Vox, has released their own open source anti-spam tool for bloggers.

TypePad AntiSpam is the product of the antispam technology Six Apart has been using in their TypePad hosted blogs since May 2007. Now the service, which is in beta, is available to anyone, open source, and free -- regardless of how large your site is or how many comments you receive. Akismet, the service this is most akin to, is free for personal use but starts at $5 a month for anyone making more than $500 a month off their blog.

TypePad AntiSpam is available as a plugin for WordPress 2.3 and 2.5 and Movable Type 3.3 and up. Six Apart says they plan to support other platforms with plugins soon, but the API is available for anyone who wants to roll their own.

We just installed TypePad AntiSpam on one of our WordPress blogs (which was running Akismet) and we'll post our thoughts in comparing the services in the weeks to come.

[via TechCrunch]

MySpace is encouraging everybody to participate in voluntary anti-spam measures to protect themselves from nuisance e-mail--an increasing problem that aggravates most everyday MySpace users. The official word from MySpace, via their e-mail newsletter is to try the following techniques: block non-friends from sending you messages, block users over or under the age of 18, depending upon how old you are, and allow only users who are privvy to your last name to send you a friend request.

Interesting--though MySpace touts them as new, none of these features are essential. Nor are any of them especially useful. Nobody under 18 is going to block the over-18 crowd. That's frankly just silly because it cuts off potential messaging between parents and teenagers. Well, if you're a teen upset with your parents, maybe it makes sense.

Then there's the blocking non-friends from e-mailing you. You already have to be a friend to comment somebody's profile, so one wonders, if social-networking is the name of the game, how can it flourish if non-friends can't message each other and then become friends?

Probably the most useful anti-spam measure is the one not mentioned in their newsletter, the one that's been around for a while: the Captcha feature, which requires non-friends to enter a graphically-generated code before they can message you or send you a friend invite. Very handy and underutilized, Captcha nearly eliminates automated "garbage invites" from systems that can't deal with Captcha images. That's the only MySpace anti-spam measure worth using.

Despite a policy against unsolicited messaging, it's just too bad MySpace doesn't take their users' spam reports seriously. Could this be one of the reasons why so many of our business buddies have recently joined Facebook? Or is MySpace's permissiveness a strategic move to maintain their position as the sixth-most heavily trafficked web site?