[clue-tech] Thunderbird junk training

[Nate Duehr]

Speaking of spam:

There's a new group doing some very interesting, active fighting of spam.

Their website is/was www.bluesecurity.com and they've gotten some good 
press and feedback from some long-term spam-fighter type folks.

Basically as I understand it, they're aggregating spam reports, finding 
the largest offenders, and then blasting thousands of bog-standard 
"opt-out" requests at them, since the opt-outs are required by law.

They're calling it a "do-not-include" registry.

The website is currently down, and it's turning into an old-fashioned 
wild-west style Internet dogfight.

Last night I received an e-mail from a spammer who came right out and 
said they were a spammer and that they would "fill my inbox with 
thousands of messages" because I was a member of bluesecurity.com's 
service and using it.

Just because I was using a service.  Wow.

I think they've gotten the attention of a lot of spammers and spammer's 
ISP's, but I'm not finding a lot of real-time information because the 
spammers are DoS'ing their websites and systems.

Their software is called "Blue Frog", if that helps with Google 
searches, etc... for those interested.

I guess my thought is this:  When I signed up for it, I thought -- hmm, 
nifty idea, and a number of well-respected e-mail "big shots" in various 
places were saying it's a good idea.  So I did it.  Now I'm getting 
threat e-mails from spammers, trying to back me off from using it... The 
spammers are actively trying to intimidate people from using it.

That tells me, whatever they're doing is damn effective.

Evidence that it's working?  I don't know.  I'll leave that up to you to 
decide.

Do I believe it will be effective forever?  No.  Spammers always find a 
way to defeat things.  But it looks like it might be the next leap 
forward in combating spam actively.

Until e-mail servers authenticate mail end-to-end, and mail's not 
anonymous... spam *will* continue.

As one friend would put it, "It's just getting interesting."

Check it out, if you feel like playing along.

Nate