Focus On: Spam

The death of the Blue Frog anti-spam client has mobilized a small group of developers to rethink Blue Security's concept. Not the tit-for-tat spam opt-out methods, mind you. The network architecture. Developers suggest that, if Blue Security had built a distributed P2P network, it could have withstood the type of attack that brought it down, along with Prolexis, Tucows, Typepad and UltraDNS. After looking over the plans, Email Battles offers a few suggestions.

Jayson Harris was the irritant that helped mold the legal approach now commonly used by Microsoft's crack Internet Safety Enforcement Team. In fact, he's logged two firsts: The Harris case is the first civil case filed by Microsoft related to phishing, and the biggest phishing case in Iowa's history. Microsoft actually calls him the "MSN Billing Phisher." So why the short sentence and puny fine?

Most who have read China's Internet Email Service Management Regulations know that, in an effort to control spam, it limits commercial email, while forcing email service providers to register all IP addresses and keep logs of email correspondents. But an article incorporated by reference strips all anti-spam pretensions aside, by aiming squarely at controlling email communications between consenting, and possibly religious or political, adults.

An Israeli company's anti-spam effort that deployed unorthodox methods to respond to spammers ended today. Blue Security claimed it was raising the white flag because too many non-combatants were being hurt in its Denial of Service battles with spammers. Others suggest that the venture capital funds dried up. In any event, the Blue Security website is down again. Just in case, Email Battles performed the post-mortem, and captured the company's final words for posterity.

Every day, it seems, some security company or industry anti-phishing coalition is grinding out a press release either extolling the virtues of its solution, or gloomily predicting the demise of Western civilization... or at least the Internet... due to phishing. But while experts cluck about phishing, users are still more concerned over a spam problem that is either too hot, too cold, or just about right. Depends on how you look at it.