New! Spam folders help keep your blog spam-free

Update: Thank you for all of your comments letting us know that the spam service is being overaggressive in categorizing your blogs' comments as spam! This is great feedback. We're working on a change that will help keep legitimate comments out of the spam folder and will post an update when it's done.

Over the past few months, we’ve been busy rolling out new features for the comment service. Today, we added out another great new feature – a spam folder for comments and TrackBacks, similar to the spam or junkmail folder found in your email service or program. This feature is available to all users.

What does the spam folder do?

The TypePad spam service prevents over half a million of pieces of spam from reaching TypePad blogs each day. But there are some messages we can’t quite be sure about. Is a comment about a mail order pharmacy on a blog about healthcare spam, or a part of the discussion? We let messages we’re unsure about through our spam filter so you don’t miss legitimate comments.

Until today, that meant that comment and TrackBack spam may have still been published on your blog. Now that we’ve added spam folders for comments and TrackBacks we can let you see messages we’re unsure of without automatically publishing them to your blog. Any messages we think may be spam will be put into the spam folders found on the comment and TrackBack listing pages.

If you find a message in a spam folder isn’t spam, simply select it and click “publish” in the dropdown to publish it to your blog. If you find a message in your regular comment or TrackBack folder, simply select it and click “report spam” to unpublish it and move it to the spam folder.

We heard from many of you who used the word and IP banning features that you sometimes miss legitimate comments from those addresses or using those words. We’ll now put comments flagged by those features into the spam folder so you have a chance to review them. 

How you can help make the spam service even better

Each time you flag a message as spam, or publish a legitimate message that’s found its way to the spam folder you help to teach TypePad what it should and shouldn’t treat as spam. Over time, this helps to make the spam service better for you, and the entire TypePad community.

You can read more about the spam folders in this Knowledge Base article.