I recently had a comment here on the blog from a reader who was concerned that commentig big style could bring you into trouble with Akismet (and other Anti-Spam plugins) The answer got a longer longer, so I decided to make it into a blog post.
Akismet and all the other Anti-Spam plugins are really a blessing for any webmaster who owns a blog with anything near decent traffic.
To be honest – I could not survive the spam flood if I did not have those myself. As I write this there are already more than 100 spam comments sitting in my spam folder. And I was not happy to find areally useful comment falsely being flagged as spam(In fact I was told that my donation form was not working). Conclusion: Akismet – this can really bring you into trouble if you are not catious when you comment.
There are people out there who flag every comment with a link or every comment from someone they don’t know as spam. Of course that is not the idea behind Akismet, but that is how some people use it 🙁
It is a wise idea to act with caution, have a look around the blogs you are planning to comment on. What is the quality of the other comment, what does the blog athor write about commenting – does he or she encourage commenting, etc. Then of course put some thought in your comments – the better your comment and the more related and valuable for the authors topic you comment is, the higher is the probability that it will go through and you won’t run into trouble.
But what if it already happened and how could you know you are in trouble? To know for sure you need a blog with akismet installed (you could get one at wordpress.com) and have to make a comment there. If your comment gets sorted into spam, you know you have been flagged.
How to lift the ban?
Difficult question – I have not run into that situation myself, but I recently had a good read about that. Head over to Barbara Ling and read what she did:
How to fix an Akismet Ban

Mike