On a WP blog (and plenty others no doubt), the name, mail, and website fields are plain old meaningless blank lines. I can fill it in with whatever I want. Maybe it’s dishonest of me to put an URL in the Website box that isn’t an URL I control. (Or is it? The field doesn’t say “my website”, it just says “website”, and maybe I put a website I like in there, or a website that is relevant to the post or my comment.)

Now, if we want those fields to be more meaningful than just agnostic (heh, pun not intended) blank lines, then perhaps there needs to be a tighter mechanism. Something that tries to affirm that the email is really your email, or that the website is really your website. But how would you go about determining that?

I suppose there’s always services like OpenID. There is an OpenID plugin for WP, I believe, in fact.

I haven’t come across any solutions.

I think partly this is a side effect of there being sites that list everyone who has a dofollow on their comments. Obviously the dofollow links can’t go back to the name-spoofed blog but the whole procedure seems to rely on people not actually looking at the blog name when they click so they might not realise it.

Sometimes normal email spam is set up so it just picks up your email address and puts it in as the sender’s name, just making it look as if someone’s been spamming from your account, while that’s not really so. I just hope the same is true of blogspam.

(If that makes any sense. )

When email viruses like SirCam come around, that’s the worst. I get spammed with bounces from the virus mails masquerading in my domain.

Generally speaking, there isn’t anything that can be done – just be glad Akismet caught it.