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Darth_Tanion · May 8, 2006, 05:19 PM

I was wondering if anyone else here uses Blue Frog for spam and if you have found that you are getting any less spam. For those who don't know what it is basically you can report your spam to the Blue Security group and they hammer the spammer's website's with opt out requests on your behalf. They send a lot of warnings to them first and things and to the host of the website first but essentially their main means of convincing spammers not to spam people in the "Blue Community" is the threat of having the performance of their website destroyed every so often. How ethical does everyone think this is? If you type Blue Security into Google you can get a few articles from PC World and other such places that give a more indepth look at the idea.

GuestWei · May 8, 2006, 08:35 PM

I use it. I used to get at least 20 spams per day. Now I either get 3~4 per week or none. Stongly recommand it. Remember to report your spams to them in order to fight it back. You can actually report it by using outlook instead of their software. Just add the address to the address book.

LTheobald · May 9, 2006, 12:57 AM

I heard about this in the TWiT podcast yesterday. Trouble is though - one hacker thought back at one time and caused Blue Frog a lot of trouble - crashed their site etc.

I personally think there's better solutions out there. Two wrongs don't make a right after all.

Darth_Tanion · May 9, 2006, 03:54 PM

Originally Posted by LTheobald

I personally think there's better solutions out there. Two wrongs don't make a right after all.

I'm all for better solutions. Just because I like this idea doesn't mean I think that nothing else is any good but I have to admit that things like spam blocking are just painful. I get so many people calling me saying that they can't receive any email just because they don't know how to configure their spam blocking so I like the idea of just stopping spam at the source. There was another idea that I heard about a while back which sounded brilliant. If you sent someone an email you had to verify yourself with their address and if they accepted you then you could email them from that point on but it never seemed to take off.

I don't really agree that this is two wrongs going on here. From what I understand they do send opt out requests and try to settle the matter peacefully but if the spammers don't listen I really don't have a problem with Blue Security asking a little louder or even a lot louder. That said however I definitely understand the problems people have with the whole system.

LTheobald · May 10, 2006, 12:25 AM

Originally Posted by Darth_Tanion

If you sent someone an email you had to verify yourself with their address and if they accepted you then you could email them from that point on but it never seemed to take off.

Actually, a number of the most popular spam filters/tools does have this kind of protection. It's called white lisiting I believe. You simply have a list of OK senders then whenever an email comes in from them it get's through straight away.

Darth_Tanion · May 10, 2006, 03:03 PM

Originally Posted by LTheobald

Actually, a number of the most popular spam filters/tools does have this kind of protection. It's called white lisiting I believe. You simply have a list of OK senders then whenever an email comes in from them it get's through straight away.

Yeah very similar idea but the idea I read about put the responsibility back on to the sender. They had to verify themselves with an email that came back to them then get authorised. This way if someone was spamming they would not get the emails back if they were using fake email addresses and if they were using a genuine email address they would be easy to block.