Blue Security’s Blue Frog has an interesting defense against spammers. If you constantly receive spam from a specific merchant, Blue Frog will bombard that spammer with email asking him to desist.
If you use Firefox, there even is an extension:
Your spam is analyzed by Blue Security experts that identify the web sites advertized by the spam you receive. The Blue Frog desktop application then proceeds to post complaints on those web sites by browsing them and filling forms they contain. Complaints are anonymous and do not reveal your identity.
Filtering spam is not enough. Blue Frog protects your email accounts or your entire mail domain by making spammers remove all Blue Community members from their mailing lists.
This release supports Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail but currently doesn’t support the new Yahoo! Mail Beta.
Blue Frog also works will all email clients.
Blue Security is currently under fire by a known spammer named PharmaMaster. From Blue Security’s website:
Starting Monday, May 1st, the Blue Community has been the target of a criminal spammer. This criminal spammer, PharmaMaster, is attempting to deny our community the right to opt-out from his spam messages.
Aside from blackmail emails sent to community members, there were two separate attacks on Blue Security itself. The first attack was to block worldwide access to Blue Security’s corporate website (www.bluesecurity.com) by tampering with the Internet backbone using a technique called “Blackhole Filtering”. The Second attack was a DDoS attack on Blue Security’s operational system.
If spammers are worried about Blue Frog, then Blue Frog must be doing something right! I’ve signed up and downloaded the application and the extension to give it a try.