Hi Benjamin (@benjaminvandenberg)!
I hope you’re doing well! I’m sorry for any inconvenience caused by the lack of frequent updates; work has been quite demanding. However, I plan to release a major upgrade for this plugin and the SMTP one this summer. I’ll strive to be more consistent with updates in the future.
Regarding your queries:
- Preventing False Positives:
The situation you’re describing is indeed tricky because the plugin flags any instance of a “bad word” within the email content or subject. Unfortunately, the plugin does not differentiate between parts of words and full words (because i remove all the spaces and special chars from the email), so “offer” in “offerte” will be flagged, and will be flagged also “o f f e r t” or “off e rt”. To mitigate this, I recommend avoiding short words that are likely to appear in other contexts. You might consider focusing on longer or more specific terms that are less likely to cause false positives.
- Using an English List on a Dutch Website:
The effectiveness of using an English bad word list depends on the nature of the spam you receive. If most of your spam is in English, it makes sense to use an English bad word list. However, if you receive significant amounts of spam in Dutch, you might need a Dutch list as well.
- Recommended English Bad Words List:
Here are some strategies you might find useful, keep in mind that you can change the warning score in the main plugin page (you can find the settings under advanced):
- High Warning Score (>0.6): Use specific phrases or names associated with spam, such as “Eric Jones” or “START EARNING NOW”.
- Low Warning Score (<0.2): Use more generic words that are commonly associated with spam, such as “guaranteed,” “winner,” “bonus,” and “urgent.” Additionally, I sometimes create custom rules for frequent spam patterns. For example, if you notice a common spam pattern (like emails with the same subject or a sentence), you can block those more effectively.
When the score reach 1 the email is considered spam, tune your custom settings according with this. If you want to ban with 5 bad words, you have to set a warning score of “0.2”. And remember that the score of all tests is added up so “3 bad words” and “2 fingerprints” failed will ban the IP address as well
I found this article with some interesting ideas for the bad words list
As always, thank you for your support and for using my plugin! ??
Kind regards,
Erik
