Setting for scan email-in posts with Akismet

Does the Akismet plugin scan posts that are processed via incoming “anonymous” email that stages an account for that user? If not, can that happen somehow?

We’ve gotten a lot of typical looking spam (invoice due, etc.) in the past week. We have a private category that receives this feedback email so while it’s not a huge impact, people watching that category are getting Discourse-based spam email notifications. :frowning:

Seems like an obvious catch for Akismet, which tends to err on the side of false positives.

Hmm is your mail provider not catching these? Email is viewed as something of a protected endpoint…

Incoming through Google Apps, and no it’s not catching (enough of) them. Of course I also get similar messages in my own Gmail accounts several times per week.

Is there any value in skipping them?

We had a LOT of false Akismet positives on PMs. A lot. That’s why we stopped doing it.

Hmm. Don’t know what the code looks like, but any chance of exposing this as a site setting for the plugin? (Maybe something like “scan incoming emails” or maybe also “scan messages”?)

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Yeah as a site / plugin setting I can support it cc @eviltrout

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If you haven’t already consider sending a custom comment_type to Akismet, perhaps “email”.

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Hmm good info, thanks! :bow:

@eviltrout can we confirm we’re using forum-post as the comment_type for the existing stuff?

This is a good idea, but I wonder if the content_type should be email for all PM’s (web or email in), while email-to-post should still be forum-post (since that’s the type of content it would be).

I guess it also depends on more factors:

  • Is the target mail address a group
  • or a reply targeting the traditional forum topics
  • Is the content sent to Akismet the raw original email (with footers etc)
  • or the processed post.

Can enough information be inferred to define a comment_type - perhaps.

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We are indeed :wink:

https://github.com/discourse/discourse-akismet/blob/master/lib/discourse_akismet.rb#L38

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So, back to the original question.

Are posts created via email in scanned via Akismet?

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