Fighting spam via blue frogs
Sending Email By Chris Shipley • 07/25/05
Nyms not only combats spam, it is one more layer of protection against other email threats viruses, worms, spyware, adware, phishing scams, and more. Better than a spam filter, Nyms puts you in control of your incoming email because it uses disposable, alias addresses. When your Nyms email aliases are shared with spammers, you can simply disable that Nyms alias and stop the spam from flooding your real inbox. spam filter to pinpoint where unsolicited messages are coming from and kill spam at its source.
Reading Email Some companies just can't wait for DEMOfall, and one of those is
Blue Security, which launched the public beta of its Blue Frog "Do
Not Intrude Registry" early last week.
Aplus.Net announces anti spam filtering services. San Diego, July, nd, Aplus.Net ( www.aplus.net ) announces the introduction of new spam filtering services today. mail accounts served by Aplus.Net and comes at no extra charge. Says Ivan Vachovsky, CEO of Aplus.Net "Aplus.Net is committed to fighting spam whenever and wherever it can. We have spent some time to come up with the most advanced technology and solution available today. mails (spam)."
Storing Email The concept is like the national Do Not Call list that has
deterred telemarketers from ruining your dinner. Instead of the
threat of fines and jail time, Blue Security creates its registry
through a community of users.
There are some things that you can do to make your online experience a little bit easier. There are some ways to keep spam from ruining your day. Spam filters are one of those things. Spam filters are an extremely successful way of managing or stopping unwanted emails, but occasionally they can work too well. While they can act very vigorously to keep your inbox from receiving spam, they can also prevent you from getting many of your wanted emails as well.
Email Software Claims to the contrary aside, Blue Security isn't the first to
claim to "disrupt the business model of spammers" by asking the
"consumer [to] join a community to fight back against spammers."
These same ideas are at the heart of Cloudmark, which for several
years has offered an effective and successful anti-spam
product.
mail that is both unsolicited by the recipient and sent in substantively identical form to many recipients. Thus, mail. Some definitions of spam specifically include the aspects of email that is unsolicited and sent in bulk. Spam filter is a program that is used to detect unsolicited and unwanted email and prevent those messages from getting to a user's inbox. Like other types of filtering programs, a spam filter looks for certain criteria on which it bases judgments.
Antispam Software Nor is it the first company to - in my words - "reverse annoy"
spammers. Turntide (acquired by Symantec) introduced at DEMO 2004
an appliance launched more or less a denial of service attack on
spammers' mail servers.
The new anti spam filters are easy to set up from the web based control panel Aplus.Net offers to its web hosting customers. The service is flexible allowing the user to select from several settings and to tune up the sensitivity of the filters. spam is not an exact science and that's why some legitimate mail may go to the spam folders if the filter is tuned to be very sensitive. That's why Aplus.Net gives the option to it's customers to review the spam folders, before erasing the spam.
Fight Spam The innovation at Blue Security is an elegant integration of
these two ideas. Blue Security disseminates a Blue Frog agent,
named for the Dendrobates azureus, the blue poison frog found in
the rain forests of southern Surinam. The otherwise adorable frog
packs a deadly poison, so much so that species of non-poisonous
frogs have adapted the blue poison frog's color as protective
camouflage.
Stoping Spam Blue Security thinks the frog is an apt metaphor for spam
fighting. The agent identifies links in unwanted e-mail, navigates
to those links and begins filling out any forms it can find on the
site. The inserted data registers as a complaint and requests that
a specific e-mail address be removed from the spammer's mail list.
The Blue Security agent continues to load the spammer's server with
complaints until "the site is so busy dealing with complaints that
it can't spam," says Eran Reshef, founder, chairman and CEO of Blue
Security.
Block Spam When I met with Blue Security in early May, Reshef thought the
concept would need a community of only 100,000 users in order to be
an effective deterrent to spam. According to a company spokeswoman,
early tests of the Do Not Intrude Registry seem to indicate that
spammers are responding to the complaint actions. "After receiving
Community complaints, a number of spammers attempted to make
changes to their Web sites, in a futile attempt to prevent the Blue
Community from submitting further complaints," she said.
Spam Emails Perhaps not the response Blue Security was looking for, but
certainly an indication that the agent is impacting a spammer's
business. (You can join the public beta by downloading the Blue
Frog agent at http://www.bluesecurity.com/register/pr.)
Email Account Blue Security is a year-old company backed by Benchmark Capital
with $3 million with an ambitious goal: to break the economics of
spam and spyware and allow consumers and enterprises to reclaim
their Internet experience. Given the disruption and expense of spam
and other malware, Blue Security has pretty good odds that it will
attract a community of 100,000. In the wild and wiley environment
of spammers, though, it remains to be seen if the introduction of
"blue poison frog" will drive an adapt or die evolution in
unsolicited e-mail marketing.
Sending Email Chris Shipley is the executive producer of NetworkWorld's DEMO
Conferences, Editor of DEMOletter and a technology industry analyst
for nearly 20 years. She can be reached at chris@demo.com. Shipley,
has covered the personal technology business since 1984 and is
regarded as one of the top analysts covering the technology
industry today. Shipley has worked as a writer and editor for
variety of technology consumer magazines, including PC Week, PC
Magazine, PC/Computing, and InfoWorld, US Magazine and Working
Woman. She has written two books on communications and Internet
technology, has won numerous awards for journalistic excellence,
and was named the #1 newsletter editor by Marketing Computers for
two years in a row. To subscribe to DEMOletter please visit:
http://www.idgexecforums.com/demoletter/index.html.
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