A New Technology to Curtail Spam in France

The government of France has launched a project with the objective to curtail spam mails. The project, called 'Signal Spam', is funded by the government and includes a technology that is designed to help Web users inform their Internet Service Providers should they receive spam mails.

An Englishman, John Graham-Cumming, who created the software used in the technology, said that French people consider spam equivalent to any other kind of crime that creates terror. Techwhack published this in news on October 6, 2007.

As a common practice, modern users straight away delete spam mails that come into their inboxes, partly because there is no easy way to inform their ISP about such a mail. The Signal Spam technology provides users a tool that will help them report spam. The software would act like a toolbar by operating from Mozilla Thunderbird and Microsoft Outlook applications.

Users who get spam messages can opt for the toolbar to conveniently forward an alert message to a database at some central location. From there, the messages would be sent to that ISP from where they originated. Then the ISP can decide for a proper action such as whether it would shutdown the sender's account, Graham-Cumming said. PCWorld reported this on October 6, 2007.

The Spamhaus Project Ltd. has labeled France as the tenth country in the world to generate maximum spam. From time to time, Spamhaus issues a list that helps e-mail servers to stop Internet Protocol (IP) addresses known for spamming. Spam affects the US most with China, Russia and the UK following.

Elaborating on the Signal Spam technology, Graham-Cumming said it does not work for a spam mail originating outside France's border. But for a message that a legitimate entity might have sent, the system has a way to tell the recipient how he can unsubscribe it from his mailing list.

The technology will be successful when people are ready to load the toolbar on their computers. Since the launch of the technology in May 2007, there have been approximately 3.5 Million spam mails in the central database. These accumulated spam mails can help in developing spam statistics.

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» SPAMfighter News - 10/19/2007