Fighting Spam and Phishing at GentleURL

As mentioned in an earlier article, our short URL service GentleURL has been shut down twice by the webspace provider. Both times without any prior notice The reason for the shut downs were that the service had been used by phishers to mask the URLs to their phishing websites.

Today we opened GentleURL for the public again. Beside some minor improvements "under the hood" we added a new feature that checks every URL against the blacklists of surbl.org and linksleeve.org.

Once the new feature has proven itself in the wild, we will add it to the official Version of Short URL Script, which is the PHP script that GentleURL is based on.