Blue Frog’s dead. But a new crew has picked up the cudgel. Calls itself The Okopipi Collective, after a poisonous frog.

And its rallying cry goes like this:

Blue Frog was a great idea. They showed us that we can bring pain to the spammers. But they could not keep up the pressure. They weren’t ready for war. We are!

Like the Blue Frog initiative, Okopipi plans to file one opt-out request per spam, even somehow throttling bandwidth to thoughtfully avoid overwhelming the spammer’s website.

But this time, the developers plan to deploy a distributed peer-to-peer network (P2P), to (hopefully) dissipate any Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) counterattacks, like those that leveled Blue Security, along with Six Apart, Tucows, Prolexic, UltraDNS and millions of their innocent, non-involved customers.

Okopipi’s developers have already reached the first stage of development. They’ve built a wiki and opened a couple of discussion groups.

Like all such planning enjoyments, discussion bubbles with:

  • offerings of new artwork;
  • questions about the proper pronounciation of okopipi;
  • cool names for Things;
  • dark murmurings of lurking trolls;
  • the need for a law to close the evil SMTP Port 25, and;
  • yearnings for a resurrected Blue Security to take the project over.

No matter what, it’s going to take awhile for Okopipi’s frog to sting. So while you’re waiting, tembow at CastleCops advises you to uninstall Blue Frog, to avoid being turned into a zombie by the same crew that decimated Blue Security.

In addition, if your network is not safely ensconced behind a good spam filtering appliance, it’s time to go shopping. If you haven’t used one, you’ll be amazed at how much of your spam and phishing nightmare vanishes. Any residual junkmail that makes it through can be quickly dispatched by hitting [Delete]. (Disclaimer: Email Battles is sponsored by trimMail Inbox.)

Spam-soaked home users should switch to lower profile email service providers that offer solid content filtering… and stop posting your email addresses all over the web.

And finally, do not opt-out, unless you use the free LashBack Toolbar (for Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express only), or something like it.

LashBack is a member in good standing of the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group, and an expert in Unsubscription Monitoring. When you select [Unsubscribe], the LashBack Toolbar submits an opt-out request, but only if the sender is listed in its database of legitimate emarketers. Anything else just helps spammers clean up their mailing lists.

Instead of confirming your live email addresses for spammers, let the spam filters quietly do their jobs, choking off unwanted messages without telling spammers anything.

Who knows? By the time Okopipi’s up-and-hopping, your spam problem may already be licked.

Email Battles Backgrounder: