Has anybody else noticed the proliferation of YouTube spam? I realized the other day that I get at least one message from YouTube a day. Most of these are from people I don’t know asking me to subscribe to or view somebody’s videos. I believe it has now reached MySpace levels.

While it does show how far YouTube has come, I wonder how well it is working. But as with all spam, you have to think that it does work, or people would not put so much time and energy into it.

Okay, among other things, I have an online store which is powered by X-cart, a pretty decent and reasonably priced e-commerce software solution. One of the things X-cart does is lets people sign up for an e-mail list for your store. Then, you can send e-mails through the software to the people subscribed to your e-mail list.

Well, because I am trying to operate the store on a tight budget, I save a few bucks by sending out e-mail newsletters through the store software. Recently, these e-mails have been getting blocked for spam, even though I have been sending them for more than a few months.

Now, these e-mails are automated, but they are not spam. I am sending product updates to my customers who have signed up voluntarily to receive e-mail updates. I have gotten blocked by at least 2 e-mail providers, Hotmail and Comcast.

Comcast however, provides you a link in the returned e-mail, http://www.comcastsupport.com/sdcxuser/lachat/user/Blockedprovider.asp, so that you can request to have your IP address removed from the blocklist. Well, I filled out the request form and explained what had happened and what I was doing. I received a response within a few hours that my IP address had been removed from the blocklist. So, it does pay to contact them if you believe you are being incorrectly blacklisted.

I do think Comcast is going overboard on the spam protection. I am a Comcast subscriber, and have almost all automated e-mails blocked daily. I think they have the dial turned up a little too high and left that way. It should not block e-mail that you asked to receive even if it is automated. They need to provide a way for subscribers to white list certain domains. It has gotten to the point where it is blocking e-mail receipts from online stores that I shop at. Not to mention that unsolicited e-mails are still getting through occasionally.

So I signed up for Gmail. Apparently, Google is much better at blocking e-mail spam that Comcast. It lets automated e-mails I want through, and I don’t get any spam.

I just had a thought of a cool widget that Askimet could make to put on your Wordpress blogs. It could be a badge that you add to your sidebar or something that displays a running count of how many comments it has blocked on your site for spam. Everyone would use it, plus, as a widget, they could add a link back and get traffic and link popularity. Also, it could help deter comment spammers. Although, I don’t know how many comment spammers actually go to the sites they spam.

Well, here is my current comment spam count for just this blog. Akismet has caught 5,563 spam for you since you first installed it.

Another fun fact, if you rearrange the letters in Askimet, is spells MISTAKE. I think Matt Mullenweg, the creator, said he came up with the idea by accident and that is where it gets its name from.