Nuking Spammers

Hiawatha
Bray, technology columnist for the Boston Globe, has been covering the
Spam Wars for quite some time now:

Today, for the first time in quite a while, he reports
on a promising new technology which promises a kind of wicked virtual
vengance for these incredibly irksome evildoers.

It’s enough to make you feel trapped, desperate, eager
to strike back with any tool at hand. So an Israeli entrepreneur’s plan
to choke spam at its source has a certain spiteful appeal.

Blue Security’s system, called Blue Frog, is available
free at bluesecurity.com. Blue
Frog registers the user’s e-mail address, then creates a dozen or so
fake addresses linked to the real address.
The phony addresses are ”honeypots," designed solely to trap
spam. When junk mail turns up, the Blue Frog system analyzes the spam
to identify
not its sender, but the advertiser that uses the spam to sell his wares
— cheap Viagra tablets, for instance. These sleazy entrepreneurs put
Web links in these e-mail messages, so they’re easy to find.

Then Blue Frog generates a program that goes to the site’s order page,
and types in a message demanding an end to the e-mails. Every time a
Blue Frog user gets a spam message at any of the honeypot addresses,
the system automatically complains. Reshef is betting that if he can
get a critical mass of 100,000 users, Blue Frog will overwhelm spam advertisers
with a relentless barrage of complaints, eventually driving them right
off the Internet.

Unfortunately, Hiawatha then goes on to say that while it
sounds like a great idea, his Spam experts tell him it is a lousy idea
and maybe illegal.  Maybe he should get new experts.  Anyway,
the great thing about this brave new world is that EVERYONE can be their
own expert, and decide for themselves.

Personally, we are nearing a state of despair over our email. It is no longer reliable, almost unusable. The filters have gotten out of control, grown savage and vengeful, and are disappearing student essays, invitations and job offers…..

from the
Boston Globe