In the last couple days I have received twelve comments on old posts here. At first I was excited. But then as I read them I realized they sound an awful lot like spam. Usually the spam filter catches these types, but these twelve didn’t end up filtered.
I’ve noticed that comments caught as spam have a lot of misspelled words or grammatical errors in them, and I assume that is how the filter chooses spam. Of these twelve, all of them have typos. Some have a lot, some only have one or two words.
My dilemma is, do I assume they are spam and delete what could be a legitimate comment from someone who was typing in a hurry like I do? Or do I assume they type like me and allow the comments, only to have problems with the blog? I so value the comments I receive here but I don’t want to risk the site.
If you have posted a comment here for the very first time, please post again and reassure me that you are a real person.
Any suggestions from my blogger friends?
Lisa Stowe - The Story River Blog 
I am not sure about your mails, I would have to look at them to be sure, but if I dont know who they are and it looks like it is not real I would not open it when I get an email. The thing is that if it contains a virus it will hit you when you open it, so you need to delete it before.
Also I dont think, that Spam is filtered out by the content of the mail, since there are people who do a lot of typos and/or do not speak another language very good, so it would be silly to filter those out because of how they wrote the email.
I know that emails with real words and names get usually through, since the system thinks they are real people and more emails with words that dont make up a real word get into the spam folder. Also if you marked somthing as Spam your system susally puts the ones comming from the same sender into the spam folder.
But that is only my experience with normal emails, not on a blog.
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It’s been hard for me,too, but I found out that some of the spammer software generates generic comments that would fit a number of post types. Now I look for things that seem to actually address what I wrote, have a web address that makes sense, and don’t have links in them. People shouldn’t send me links unless I know them already. I’ve nothing against a blogger trying to find readers for their own site, but if they obviously didn’t read what I wrote (and WordPress thinks they’re spam) I go ahead and delete.
There’s also a spammer that says how much they love you and your whole blog, but if you click on them, they’re trying to sell you something. If you have a PC, you don’t want to click on any of these, just in case. Better to continue what you’re doing, and be safe.
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Lisa, I’m very late to this, but Ré and Anna have got it right: spam comments are usually generic and could apply to any post (“you have very interesting thoughts” or “I appreciate this info very much”), and they usually link to a weird-looking URL in the comment or in their name. Often there’s something off about the English too; Erik tells me that that’s partly deliberate, to throw off the spam filters (since they can’t possibly filter for every single odd-yet-still-comprehensible version of how to say something).
WordPress is pretty good at filtering my spam comments out, but I get them on my old LiveJournal entries and have to go back and delete those manually.
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I thought that WP automatically puts mail from certain people into spam if they have been reported as spammers. I think that’s oftentimes how it works on my blog– it’s not what they say (usually vaguely nice, innocuous, unspecific) but who it’s from that sends them to spam. Don’t know for sure, though– maybe contact WP or look at their spam policies before you respond to those people, though. (Let us know if you get an answer. Maybe I should go check out my spam and make sure!)
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Good advice. I’m going to go back and re-read them. Only one seemed to address what the blog was about.
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