This blog is powered by WordPress. Among other things, it notifies me when somebody posted a comment that needs to be moderated. Notifications go to my GMail address.

The other day, I found two notification mails in GMail’s Spam section, that looked like this:

A new comment on the post #29 “Python vs Scheme: strings” is waiting for your approval
http://4.flowsnake.org/archives/29

Author : Xvyozvcu (IP: 206.53.55.5 , 206.53.55.5)
E-mail : yqufupiy@gmail.com
URL : http://blahblah.com/blah.html
Whois : http://ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl?queryinput=206.53.55.5
Comment:
[...lots of bogus text with spammy URLs elided...]

The question is: from GMail’s point of view, is this message spam or not?

My first reaction would be, no, it’s not spam… it’s a valid notification message with comment text that happens to contain spam. But there’s a problem with that: the actual mail *does* contain spam, whether it’s in the context of a WordPress comment or not, and marking it as non-spam might well give the spam filter the wrong idea.

On the other hand, if I do mark it as spam in GMail, then it might conclude that valid WordPress notifications are spam as well! (After all, they share the same header and structure.)

Hmm. Can’t win for losing. Eventually I decided to leave them marked as non-spam, and deleted them manually. I’d rather get a few notifications that contain spam, than miss valid comments because they were mistakenly thrown in the spam bucket. Akismet should catch this kind of thing anyway (and usually does), so I should not get too many of those messages. Still, it’s an odd problem.