Once or twice on most days, I'll get a notification of a comment coming through that is (to me) obviously spam, so I delete it. No big deal. When you see an email like this every day, it can lead you to think "how well is my spam blocker working?"

Well, in my case the answer is a resounding yes. I use Mollom, and I looked at its dashboard today to see just how much it's working.

Mollom has blocked 526,332 spam attempts in the last 410 days

As we say in the business, HOLY SMOKE!

It's disappointing that this incredible daily deluge of attempted spam continues to be the reality on the web. We have bigger fish to fry with Heartbleed and other serious security vulnerabilities discovered in the software we use every day of course, but this background noise of spam comments is still a serious daily annoyance, and seems like it could outlast us all.