Akismet Anti-spam vs Mailgun

The best anti-spam protection to block spam comments and spam in a contact form. The most trusted antispam solution for WordPress and WooCommerce. Akismet checks your comments and contact form submissions against our global database of spam to prevent your site from publishing malicious content. You can review the comment spam it catches on your blog’s “Comments” admin screen. Major features in Akismet include: Automatically checks all comments and filters out the ones that look like spam. Each comment has a status history, so you can easily see which comments were caught or cleared by Akismet and which were spammed or unspammed by a moderator. URLs are shown in the comment body to reveal hidden or misleading links. Moderators can see the number of approved comments for each user. A discard feature that outright blocks the worst spam, saving you disk space and speeding up your site. PS: You’ll be prompted to get an Akismet.com API key to use it, once activated. Keys are free for personal blogs; paid subscriptions are available for businesses and commercial sites.

Most email validators look for an @ and a .(dot) some go further and blacklist certain domain names. But Mailgun’s Advanced email validation service goes deeper and looks for the existence of the domain name, presence of a MX record and the custom ESP(Email Service Provider) grammar. The grammar here is the rules defined by each email provider. For example, Yahoo Mail addresses can only contain letters, numbers, underscores, and one period. So user.name.abc@yahoo.com perfectly passes the is_email() function but can never exist as it contains more than one period. Such addresses can’t escape Mailgun’s Email validation. Why use Mailgun’s email validation service? Performs the usual email syntax check. Checks the existence of the email domain. So user@some-random-characters.com can’t escape. Checks if the email domain has a MX record. So anything@example.com is caught. Checks if the username complies with the grammar of its ESP (Email Service provider). Eg Gmail doesn’t allow usernames less than 6 characters and hyphens so small@gmail.com and hyphen-user@gmail.com can’t get away. Why use this plugin? Integrates with the is_email() function of WordPress. So it works seamlessly with Contact Form 7, Jetpack/Grunion contact forms, WordPress registration form and any form which uses the is_email() function. Kicks spam before it is inserted into the database Ensures that the commenting process is uninterrupted even if Mailgun suffers a downtime Works completely transparent, nothing changes in the frontend This plugin requires a Mailgun Public API Key which can be obtained by signing up at Mailgun. If you’re trying out this plugin on a local WAMP/LAMP/MAMP installation make sure your system is connected to the Internet for this plugin to contact Mailgun. Available Languages English Serbo-Croatian by Borisa Djuraskovic Spanish by Andrew Kurtis Further Reading Read about Mailgun’s email validation service. http://blog.mailgun.com/post/free-email-validation-api-for-web-forms/ http://blog.mailgun.com/post/weekly-product-update-improvements-to-email-validation-api/ Mailgun Address Validator demo and its source code The Mailgun Email Validator Plugin official homepage.