Blue Frog Anti-Spam

[Paul]

Works in a lot of browsers but not yet compatible with IE7 Beta2
http://www.bluesecurity.com/blue-frog/

Blue Frog empowers you to exercise your opt-out right in a safe and secure manner and allows you to register your email addresses or your personal email domains in the Do Not Intrude Registry, free of charge.
Blue Frog actively fights spam by posting opt-out requests on the sites advertised by the spam you receive. You may report your spam from any desktop email client or let Blue Frog automatically report your Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo spam directly from your browser.
Filtering spam is not enough. Blue Frog protects your email accounts or your entire mail domain by making spammers remove your from their mailing lists.
Download Blue Frog and join the members of the Blue Community in their fight against spam. Over 400,000 email addresses protected.

Been using it a while now and seems to work, I let it chew over my hotmail.com address as that's been a spam magnet that I use lol.

[Druchii]

Sounds good, but really "hardcore" spammers would simply see it as an active email address and spam it more wouldn't they?

[Stuart C]

My thoughts exactly.

[Paul]

Spammers do not get to know what email addresses complain about the spamming. Peoples reports go into a central repository/ registry and then the Blue Frog group deal with the contact with spammers themselves.

[patrickp]

How can the spammers remove people from their mailing lists (assuming that they _would_ do that) if they don't know who to remove?

[Druchii]

Originally Posted by patrickp

How can the spammers remove people from their mailing lists (assuming that they _would_ do that) if they don't know who to remove?

Unless blue frog are the spammers? *conspiracy theory*

[Paul]

If Blue Frog were "spammers" then they wouldn't currently be having issues with people spamming their threads on the FF extension areas and forums trying to put people off using the tool
How they deal with spammers without revealing email adresses as "live" adresses is listed here but basically they aim the complaint at the merchants that are paying the spammers

Why are complaints directed at the merchant advertising his business using spam?

Merchants and advertisers pay spammers to launch their campaigns, and are therefore the root cause of spam. These merchants must make sure potential buyers know where to purchase their products. Hence, unlike spammers, they cannot hide their identity because this renders their mass mailing campaign totally ineffective.

How are members' emails addresses kept safe?

Blue Security takes precautions to protect the contents of the Do Not Intrude Registry by exposing it only in an encrypted form. In addition to members' addresses, the Registry also contains a high percentage of fake e-mail addresses and addresses of honeypot e-mail accounts used for analysis.

I've been using the frog tool for over a week and my email spam has shown no sign of increasing at all BUT spam that I have reported in my Hotmail accounts has never returned. Obviously with the additional filtering on my Gmail account the likelihood of it returning there is extremely thin.
If however this turns out to be a harvesting site then we will know very soon as a large number of people on other forums are now using it. If the smelly stuff hits then it will hit in a very public way. Also the guys behind Mailwasher will get a slap as Blue Frog is working with them to develop the tool

[Luckyjfl]

Well Guys, I am so glad I saw this item on the Forum. Today I have received several e-mails with the same message in them, threatening to send me more if I did not STOP using the bluesecurity Anti spam. Best of all, I never heard of bluesecurity, until today. I do not like being threatened, but not sure just what to do. Anythoughts would be appreciatted. Here is the Pro spam email.

Hey,
You are recieving this email because you are a member of BlueSecurity (http://www.bluesecurity.com).

You signed up because you were expecting to recieve a lesser amount of spam, unfortunately, due to the tactics used by BlueSecurity, you will end up recieving this message, or other nonsensical spams 20-40 times more than you would normally.

How do you make it stop?

Simple, in 48 hours, and every 48 hours thereafter, we will run our current list of BlueSecurity subscribers through BlueSecurity's database, if you arent there.. you wont get this again.

We have devised a method to retrieve your address from their database, so by signing up and remaining a BlueSecurity user not only are you opening yourself up for this, you are also potentially verifying your email address through them to even more spammers, and will end up getting up even more spam as an end-result.

By signing up for bluesecurity, you are doing the exact opposite of what you want, so delete your account, and you will stop recieving this.

Why are we doing this?

Its simple, we dont want to, but BlueSecurity is forcing us. We would much rather not waste our resources and send you these useless mails, but do not believe for one second that we will stop this tirade of emails if you choose to stay with BlueSecurity.
Just remember one thing when you read this, we didnt do this to you, BlueSecurity did.

If BlueSecurity decides to play fair, we will do the same.

We are quite sure you will think this will not continue, that we will not continue wasting our resources doing this, feel free to wait out the first 48, or the second, and see whether these stop, you will be quite suprised.

If you have another email under the protection of bluesecurity, and have not recieved this there, do not worry, you will soon enough.

We mightve had your email addresses before in our lists, but now, we are targetting YOU, because YOU are a bluesecurity user.

You might also notice, that the BlueSecurity site(http://www.bluesecurity.com) is down..

Just remove yourself from BlueSecurity, and make it easier on you.

Doris Jarrett

[JadeFalcon]

ahhh but this is just a threat tactic by spammers lol ... they are scared of their resources drying up nobody will use them to spam they will run out of funds eventually and wont have accounts to spam from lol

[Luckyjfl]

Thanks for getting back to me Jade. The funny thing about all this is, the Bluesecurity site, seems to be down. Whether it is permanant I do not know. I am now more determined to get hold of a decent antispam program, preferbly, free.
Cheers

[Maggy J]

Originally Posted by Luckyjfl

Thanks for getting back to me Jade. The funny thing about all this is, the Bluesecurity site, seems to be down. Whether it is permanant I do not know. I am now more determined to get hold of a decent antispam program, preferbly, free.
Cheers

The one I use isn't free but it is good and relatively cheap.It's Cloudmark's Desktop and comes in two flavours for Microsoft Outlook Express or Microsoft Outlook.

http://www.cloudmark.com/homeoffice/

It's also got a new anti-phishing element to it. Why not give the free trial a go?

[Shaun]

You could route all your mail through a free Gmail or Yahoo account. I;ve found both to be really effective against spam.

[JadeFalcon]

well it looks like this war could get nasty as bluesecurity are planing some kind of DOS attack on spamers .. the bluesecurity.com site downage is probably just the spammers moving up from threatening emails cause they not working

edit:---

it gets better

http://www.mmfhoh.org/index.php?titl...&c=1&tb=1&pb=1

bluesecurity has had its dbases hacked

[Paul]

If they have hacked the data base then they did a bad job of it, I have 3 email addresses listed with Bluefrog and haven't received the threatening email to any of them. I know someone else who has 2 or 3 listed and again no email sent to them.
Could get interesting though if the spammers start opening the floodgates as they may find some of the big ISPs getting annoyed due to the increase in badwidth being used lol

[Luckyjfl]

Thanks for the input Guys. I will take on board all the advice suggested.

Cheers