Blue Frog
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| Developer(s) | Blue Security |
|---|---|
| Operating system |
Microsoft Windows Extension for Mozilla Firefox |
| License | Open Source |
| Website | Blue Security Inc. (archived) |
The Blue Frog tool, produced by Blue Security Inc., operated in 2006 as part of a community-based anti-spam system which tried to persuade spammers to remove community members' addresses from their mailing lists by automating the complaint process for each user as spam is received. Blue Security maintained these addresses in a hashed form in a Do Not Intrude Registry, and spammers could use free tools to clean their lists.
Community members reported their spam to Blue Security, which analyzed it to make sure it met their guidelines, then reported sites sending illegal spam to the ISPs which hosted them (if they could be contacted and were willing to work with them), to other anti-spam groups and to law-enforcement authorities in an attempt to get the spammer to cease and desist. If these measures failed, Blue Security sent back a set of instructions to a Blue Frog client. The client software used these instructions to visit and leave complaints on the websites advertised by the spam messages. For each spam message a user received, their Blue Frog client would leave one generic complaint, including instructions on how to remove all Blue Security users from future mailings. Blue Security operated on the assumption that as the community grew, the flow of complaints from tens or hundreds of thousands of computers would apply enough pressure on spammers and their clients to convince them to stop spamming members of the Blue Security community.
The Blue Frog software included a Firefox and Internet Explorer plugin allowing Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo! Mail e-mail users to report their spam automatically. Users could also report spam from desktop email applications such as Microsoft Office Outlook, Outlook Express and Mozilla Thunderbird.
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Wikipedia