If you find yourself the recipient of a spammy blog comment, and the spammer happens to be using a Gmail account as their "return address" for the comment, then Google provides a .

The cool part was that I didn't even have to go log into a work machine to find out who I needed to talk to (at work) about these low-lifes! I've met a few guys on the Gmail team, but looking up their email addresses and writing them an email from my work account would involve dragging out the laptop and such. Too much effort for a Saturday morning. I (sort of recursively, I guess) did a Google search for Gmail spam abuse and there was the form. How meta-handy is that?

It's much better to use the official abuse form than try to "back channel" it anyway. Added bonus is that anyone can report Gmail abuse using that form, and it wasn't hard to find.

I've never bothered looking for a Yahoo abuse form, since I long ago blocked any yahoo.com address from being able to leave comments here. So I can't say what those guys are doing. Seems like a lot of junk comes from the yahoo.com domain, though. (Maybe because it's been around longer than gmail.com?) I did some numbers a while back and close to half of the spammy comments left here had a yahoo.com at the end of the email address. So rather than report each one, I just blocked the entire domain.

But the really sad part was the spammy comment left today was for a kid's website. Kids! The website they wanted to clog search results with was this one: http://www.funbrain.com/. As you can see from for the phrases used in my spam comment, this particular slimeball has been quite busy lately. Just pathetic...

Anyway, I'll try pretty darn hard to see that they don't get to leave any more spam with that account.