Score another one for voluntaryism and the free market in the fight against email spam. Tired of receiving tons of spam? Don’t want to join a coercive government registry or support any coercive government legislation? Then you might want to check out Blue Security.
The ingenious developers at Blue Security have created a way for you to report spam and reduce the amount you receive with little or no hassle. All you have to do is join the Blue Community, download the Blue Frog software program, and report spam when you receive it. If spammers don’t stop sending spam to those in the community, Blue Security identifies the spammer and uses scripts in Blue Frog to automatically post complaints. The power of large numbers. Many, if not most, spammers have strong business incentives to reduce complaints and stop sending spam to those who have declared their intention not to receive it.
There are downloadable extensions for Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird, making the service even easier to use for those who use these programs.
The service is currently in beta testing and free. You can register up to 10 email addresses and one domain name. I’m not sure if they’ll eventually start charging for email protection but the FAQ on their website indicates that they will eventually start charging businesses and for domain name coverage. However, those who sign on now, the company says, will continue to be served for free. And this is no April Fools joke.
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The vast majority of spam these days is Nigerian 419 scams, advertisement for prescription drugs, bank phishing, and pump-n-dump stock spam. Blatant, criminal fraud. One might as well join a business which places you on a “do not rape” or “do not rob” list.
They’re criminals. If they respected polite requests, we wouldn’t have this problem.
Blue Security doesn’t just rely upon the spammers to respect polite requests. They flood the spammers with complaints on a 1-for-1 basis – 1 complaint for every spam email sent to a member of the Blue Community. Tit-for-tat. With hundreds of thousands of members, as has already been reached, this can be quite a hassle for the spammers and gives them an incentive to stop. Check out the website and see how the service works.
Geoffrey,
Interesting…the concept behind it — making spammers pay a computational cost for their spamming — reminds me of a solution I’ve heard MS is developing, which would require the person sending an e-mail to solve a simple computational code to send it. This would take only a few seconds for sending an e-mail to 1 or 2 people (or even a good number), but would become computationally very costly for the quantities of bulk-mail utilized by spammers.
Which is just Adam Back’s hashcash scheme again. Hashcash has been around since 1997.
I’ve joined BlueSecurity around a week ago, and so far not even one of my complaints has been processed… The idea is great, but the amount of work required for their internal staff is a serious bottleneck.
David, MS has been “developing this solution” for well over three years [the Penny Black Project], and the solution has been developed a long time ago [see Peter's note - HashCash], independently. Microsoft, as usual, wants us to believe they’re the leading technology experts and they’re the ones developing new stuff (like Sender ID which is an SPF ripoff with only two minor things changed). They’re not. Look around you…
One measure of the effectiveness of the BlueSecurity solution is the addition of their list to one major spam-sending program. Almost all spammers use such software to send spam, so BlueSecurity does seem to be protecting its users.
Peter, Tomasz,
Thanks for the fyi’s on who came up with the technology first (although I didn’t say MS was the first to work on this solution).
“They flood the spammers …”
In order for that to be possible the spammers would have to honestly identify themselves and utilize only their own resources. But spammers aren’t honest, and they steal resources.
They hijack servers and personal computers not only to send the spam, but to host their web sites. They put other people’s names on their outgoing mail. (This is particularly true of phishing spam, where the whole point is to masquerade as the recipient’s bank.) Some spammers direct responses to phone numbers with voice mail, while others (particularly the pump-n-dump stock spammers) require no contact information at all: the only communication they require is for people to buy the touted stock. Spammers with web sites already expect them to be taken down within hours, so they create thousands of cookie-cutter pages on different free or cheap web hosts, often using stolen credit cards.
So who, exactly, is BlueSecurity flooding?
Suppose I send out an email to millions of people, fraudulently claiming to be from my competitor. Will BlueSecurity helpfully flood them off the internet for me?
Ernunnos,
Obviously, Blue Security can’t completely eliminate spam. They don’t claim to and I didn’t claim they could. They do claim they can reduce the amount of spam you receive over time. I would imagine the particularly fraudulent and mischievous sources of spam will not be severely deterred by Blue Security, although they may be hindered. There are many other sources of spam, however.
As to your questions about who Blue Security is flooding and how this is done, I suggest you take a brief look at the website to see for yourself. It is easy to browse. Basically, they check to make sure they have the right guy, so to speak, before sending the complaints. Whether or not this results or will result in a bottleneck that will reduce the effectiveness of Blue Security’s mission, as Tomasz mentioned above, I can’t say yet. We’ll have to see, but the idea behind this is interesting.
I wonder who can help the other people impacted by pump and dump stock spam. We get hundreds of bounces (backscatter) each week from some spammer who forges our email address into his broadcasts. More info here:
http://www.donwright.com/stockfraud
I agree with Ernunnos. How is it a victory for “voluntaryism” and the free market to pay someone money to put you on a don’t-hurt-me list? (And if you keep getting hurt, you’re upgraded to the I-said-stop-hurting-me list.)
And isn’t spam an automated function? Why should a spammer care about complaints filling an inbox that’s never going to be checked?
Blue Security’s site is down, so either (1) the server is flooded from so many hits by Austrian school economists or (2) the owners have gotten enough money for their non-service to close shop and move to Florida.
Reactionary wrote:
“I agree with Ernunnos. How is it a victory for “voluntaryism” and the free market to pay someone money to put you on a don’t-hurt-me list? (And if you keep getting hurt, you’re upgraded to the I-said-stop-hurting-me list.)
And isn’t spam an automated function? Why should a spammer care about complaints filling an inbox that’s never going to be checked?
Blue Security’s site is down, so either (1) the server is flooded from so many hits by Austrian school economists or (2) the owners have gotten enough money for their non-service to close shop and move to Florida.”
My reply:
By the argument of your first paragraph it would seem you are committed to holding that because we have to contend with burglars and other such criminals that it is not a victory of the free market for private security services to be provided.
As to the second paragraph, you don’t understand how BlueFrog Security was designed to function. As to the third, it is unfortunate that since my original posting of this blog BlueFrog has shut down its services because it lost the war against spammers. It had an interesting idea, but unfortunately one persistent, creative, and unscrupulous spammer fought back and attacked their paying (business) clients. (By the way, regular individuals received the service for free. If you are interested, you could probably do a Google search for more on how Blue Security worked and how it was attacked and decided to shut down.
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