Blue Frog - (and the Spam War)

I meant to write about this the other day as it's very important news, but I completely forgot. Those of you who actualy visit http://ma.ttlowe.co.uk to read my blog (as opposed to using the RSS feed) may have noticed a new addition to the page: A "bluesecurity" logo which links to their site. I placed the logo on my blog to show my support for the Blue Frog spam reporting tool. Here's the gist:

Blue Frog is a plug-in for your browser (and a few mail clients) which interacts with your webmail. It automatically trawls your spam folder and reports any new spams it find in there to bluesecurity, who analyse the mails and then do one of several things: They start by submitting opt-out requests to the site that originated the email, and the company the email is advertising on behalf of. They also maintain a "do not intrude registry" which they make available (in a secured form) to spammers and tell them "if you intrude on any email in this list there will be retribution from the entire community". The great thing about all this, is this:

It's working.

The spammers hate it. For every spam they send out to a blue-frog protected member they get an opt-out request back. They seem to think they're just "trying to make an honest dollar", but they're killing people's inboxes. They're breaking the law (Blue-Frog only reacts to non-can-spam compliant emails) and they need dealing with. This is the first time we've seen the spammers running away from a spam protection utility, because they realise they can't contend with it.

However one or two have tried to fight back (although that was kind of inevitable). The bluesecurity website was DDoS'ed for most of yesterday and is just back online again today. Luckily the blue-frog website was secure and the system remained operational. There was precious little information coming from the blue-frog people, but then they were probably busy dealing with the huge spike in spam that's been reported over the last few days.

It's now a war against normal people and spammers - although the spammers seem to think it's a war against bluesecurity and spammers. Bluesecurity are standing up for real people who just don't want to receive this crap in their inboxes each day. So download Blue Frog now, and help take back the Internet!