Ever heard of Blue Frog? It was an Israeli company's effort to combat spam by automatically sending opt-out comments to spammers. The premise was that any spam e-mail that a spammer sent would be reciprocated by an opt-out request. Since spammers typically send out millions of their much-hated e-mails, Blue Frog would then have to send them back millions of opt-out requests, thereby causing a form of denial of service or simple annoyance. Unfortunately, the spamming mafias flexed their Internet and political muscles and Blue Frog eventually declared defeat.

Anyway, an open source consortium of programmers started up Black Frog in response to the demise of Blue Frog. I don't know how that has been coming along. I am curious though, does anybody knows of the state of efforts to combat the endless onslaught of spamming?

Spam is becoming very annoying.

I remeber hearing about the frog thing ..its a great idea..but i used to get a lot of spam and would kinda do that bounce an opt out request at them for days also a good trick for getting a spamming company angry is to trace the ips back..hopefully you can resolve a company name..do a bit of googling for that company...look for any email contacts on thier pages ..and heres a good tip 99% of companies have generic email addys such as sales@ or info@ and recption@ etc...add them to the "blacklist" also...also if anyones names are mentioned on the site..address it to them in the subject header too...generally firms give up after you hit 20 email accounts of theres with spam for a few weeks..then contact you to get you to stop
Then its a trade off...Ill delete you if you delete me situation )

But these days I dont get much spam...I noticed that gmail is very good for cutting the spam out!!

Marky;)

Those are some cool ideas. My main email address never gets spam. I don't thing I have ever recieved one spam email in the 5 years that I have had it. That address I use for work, friends, personal stuff, family and anyone that I trust. I never give this address out ot people that I do not trust. I have a gmail account that I use to sign up for websites and stuff like that. I also use it for some other things. This has worked very nicely for me.

My spam folder in Yahoo is always full with at least 20 emails from who knows where. My main email never gets anything, and at the moment my gmail is hardly used as I just got it. I don't know how to stop getting so much spam at this yahoo account. It's insane the amount I get. I don't know how I keep getting it or where it is coming from. I don't want to open it to see if there is an 'unsubscribe' button just incase there is some kind of virus in there, so I just delete them.

Most of the spammer's mails I receive these days come from fake address, or even from other people's personal address. Causing these latter stolen personal address mailboxes denial of service would be rather unfair and probably fully unlegal...

Yup, I agree with Mark420. Gmail does a good job in filering out spam. Hotmail is real lousy in that aspect. And his suggestion of getting back at these spammers companies is really good. Hit them where it counts. And that's at the e-mail addresses that they use 'normally', that is not for spamming.

I too, would like to hear more about the frog thingy. But I have a serious doubt about the efficacy of the frog thingy. Unless the frog software continuously sends a spam e-mail to the spammer's address, otherwise the spammer can just spam in the wee morning and then shut down their mail server. Or all incoming mail is not allowed. I don't know. Like I said, I would love to know more about this frog thingy.

I think Blue Frog sent the opt-out requests to the companies whose products were advertised in the spam, and not to the spammers themselves. Most spammers would give fake e-mail addresses anyway.

Unfortunately, the service has gone the way of the dinosaurs ... extinct. The Russian spam mafia was too powerful. The story is an interesting, but disappointing, read (try a Google search).