New spam-fighting system for France

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.

18 May 2007

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