Until this week, I did not allow Akismet to automatically delete my spam, because occasionally a bona fide comment would show up in my spam folder.  Instead, I used to go through the folder every day and manually remove the spam after checking to make sure something wasn’t in there that didn’t belong.

But my amount of spam grew to a point where the job of manually deleting it every day grew too cumbersome.   So I had to make a decision.  Let Akismet automatically delete the spam or continue to slog through the spam folder every day?   I opted for the the auto-delete.

For some reason, there are one or two people whose comments keep going into my spam folder. I have no idea why.   Their comments don’t include links or other spam indicators so I really have no idea why Akismet thinks they’re spam.   Fortunately, even though my spam is on auto-delete now,  there were still a few comments left in my spam folder (Akismet only auto-deletes the most “pervasive” spam, whatever that means) and one of the not-spam comments was in there.  I rescued the comment, approved it, and marked it “not spam.”  Akismet doesn’t seem to learn though.   It’s not the first time that I’ve had to save this particular person’s comments (for some reason I still have to approve their comments too), so I can’t guarantee their next comment won’t be auto-deleted.

I want to apologize in advance to anyone who may wonder why their comments never showed up.  Akismet’s accuracy rate is pretty good, which is why I am allowing auto-delete, but it certainly makes mistakes so don’t think that if your comment doesn’t show up it means I didn’t approve it or that I hate you.   Blame my spam-blocker.