Blue Frog Anti-Spam

I stumbled across this the other day. It's a novel idea although I'm not entirely sure of its efficacy. It relies, on the whole, on spammers setting up real accounts on real ISPs and using them to spam the world. However from what I understand, the majority of spam is sent from compromised/zombied Windows machines on cable Internet connections, and you can't really trace the spammer that way.

I've been trying it for the last few days. I've registered 4 of my email addresses with them and have been monitoring my spam. Here are the general results:

My Yahoo address: Normally receives about 10 spams a day. I've been averaging 4 since registering.

Forwarded mail from my domain name: One particular account is particularly prone to receiving spam as it used to be available on the web. Just before I installed blue frog I was averaging about 20 spams a day on this account. It seems to be closer to about 5 now. Thankfully I've stopped receiving those damned "Charity/non-profit website" emails.

My Hotmail Account: Hard to say how much I normally get on this account as I've not used it for actual email in about 5 years. At the moment I'm not receiving ANY spam on this account.

My main Gmail account: Normally about 3 or 4 emails a day. No real difference since installing Blue Frog.

I rather like the way it works, it's very simple and just does its job without asking pointless questions. My only dislike is that when viewing a protected webmail account it shows a little Blue Frog box which I can't turn off. Sometimes it can get in the way and I have to move it ... but that's not really too much of a problem.

The way I see it, this would be very useful for someone whose account has become over-run with spam, but possibly isn't worth the effort for someone whose account only receives one or two spams. Obviously, normal spam-protection measures should be kept in place as this is by no means a perfect solution, and I doubt there ever will be.