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A Community Approach to Fighting Spam

Techstination feature for Thursday, March 16, 2006

A community approach to fighting spam. Bloomberg Boot Camp, a report on today's technology. Microsoft, AOL and others have been employing a variety of tools to try to reduce the volume of junk email or spam that finds its way into your inbox. But the problem hasn't disappeared yet. A company called Blue Security is taking a different approach. Founder and CEO Eran Reshef says Blue Frog takes a more community oriented approach…

"Under the first amendment, you have the right to be left alone and under the Can Spam law, you have the right to ask spammers to opt you out from the list and they have to comply with your request. Up until now, it was very hard to do so. So what Blue Security is all about is about automating and helping you to exercise your right easily and actually get spammers to stop sending you spam. And what we have seen so far is that half of the members of our community are actually receiving less spam from spammers just because they stand up for their right not to receive spam."

How does it work? Reshef says the application at BlueSecurity.com is free…

"You register your email address with us and then basically you start forwarding your spam to Blue Security for analysis. And then the next thing that happens is that you basically send opt out requests to the spammers, asking them to stop spamming you."

The spammers essentially get spammed back….and some question the ethics of what amounts to a denial of service attack. The latest version of the software is designed to work with Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo Mail accounts. Bloomberg Boot Camp, I'm Fred Fishkin.