Junk mail blacklisting project goes live.
A group of public bodies and private companies have joined forces to implement a new system allowing French email users to report spam email to a centralised system for evaluation and blacklisting. The project,
Signal Spam
, also provides data to ISPs hosting spamming systems and opt-out information for users receiveing unwanted but legitimate bulk emails.
The
Signal Spam
project is backed by several French public and governmental institutions, including the police, the justice ministry and the postal service, as well as corporate bodies such as
Microsoft
. Spam data can be passed into the sytem either manually, via a web interface, or using plugin tools currently available for
Outlook
,
Outlook Express
and
Thunderbird
, with support for other mailing systems planned for the near future.
The project focuses on protecting French citizens from spamming, and only ISPs based in France will be warned if spam or botnet-like activity is spotted coming from their systems. Development of the database systems used to store the spams and to extract useful metadata from them was led by anti-spam guru, and regular
VB Spam Bulletin
contributor, John Graham-Cumming.
A report on the new service from French law website
French-Law.net
can be found
here
, and the
Signal Spam
website is
here
(in English) or
here
(in French). More technical details on the inner workings of the system are available in a blog posting by its developer,
here
and, for VB
subscribers
a full write up will appear in the July issue of Virus Bulletin (publication date 1 July 2007).
John Graham-Cumming will be presenting a paper on the latest spam techniques, entitled
‘The Spammers’ Compendium: five years on’
, at VB2007 in Vienna (19-21 September). Details of how to register for the conference are
here
.
Posted on 18 May 2007 by
Virus Bulletin
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