Someone should start a business getting companies/persons competitors ( other legitimate people/companies) marked as spam by Askimet or Google etc, because it just seems so easy to do!

/sarcasm

That is a BIG worry and a huge problem which should be addressed. There are a lot of things that we dread competitors doing which are myths, such as being banned from search engines by spamming too much them with your website URL, or them having your site linked from link farm sites in order to make your PageRank drop. But this is a legitimate way of how your competition can get your site blocked from ever appearing in blog comments.

The blog OWNER is not the person flagging someone as a spammer.

It’s the PLUGIN that does it automatically, and then the blog OWNER has to go in and approve the comment.

Your comments rarely, completely disappear… it just takes a while before they show up. Don’t take it personally! It could be because you’ve written something that’s too long, you have never left a comment before on that particular site, or you’ve used certain words/phrases that set off the owner’s filter.

Really… calm down about it, don’t take it personal because it’s NOT, and just wait a bit to give the blog owner time to put your comment through. You have NO IDEA how many spam comments are on this site every day… I’m telling you it’s in the SEVERAL THOUSANDS. Out of that several thousand that are truly spam, you want me to let them all go through and then delete them after the fact? Sorry… doesn’t work that way.

Sometimes a post so moved me and I write a beautiful comment expressing my emotions and all, only to see that it’s been ignored. It was frustrating really.

For this post I’m not even sure if it will go through, if not then I have wasted my breath yet once again. If it goes through then I hope that blog owners will try to be more considerate and stop flagging everyone as spam. A delete is sufficient I think if you don’t like the comment, right?

Thanks a lot for this post by the way, has seriously helped alot!
(Now here’s to hoping that this comment will go through!)

Lately I tried to post one lengthy non spam comment (I never post comment spams anyway) to Techcrunch and what it says is it is blocked ! nothing coming. I went to akismet about it, and am waiting their reply.

I got several times my comments rejected by akismet for no reason whatever. I guess they should make their minds about spams. In fact in your case, Darren, most of those blocked 4 million may not be comment spams.

Whenever I leave a comment on someones blog and put my own web address in the “Website” field almost 99% of the time my comment never appears. Ive resorted to having to comment without putting my blog site down which kind of sucks.

I only comment on articles where I have something to say. I cant understand why akismet treats my comments as spam. Im almost at a point where I dont want to comment anymore because its just a waste of time.

Im also now in the habit of cutting/pasting my comment into notepad before submitting just in case I have to email it using the contact form ..

Reminds me of when Yahoo first came out with their spamguard (or whatever it’s called). It seemed to be reversed. All my spam was in my Inbox and all my good stuff was in my Spam.

Correcting it took around a month, as it steadily learned. Now it borders on foolproof.

you’re not the only one who’s having this kind of dilemma. my blog does not receive as many comments as yours but i too receive the same emails from (sometimes) angry commentators. in fact, i even told my readers that if your comments are caught by akismet, then forgive me because i’m already tired of checking the akismet bin every now and then.

This may be your problem as well…

I would check here: http://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx
first, and if their IP is listed contact the commenter and have their mail provider remove them from those blacklists first, THEN have their mail provider make sure their Email servers are safe, secure and as spam free as possible (they can use a spam filter like barracuda) to prevent them from being blacklisted again.

I do agree with the Akismet whitelist though.

:)