Defensio promises to end evil spam

By Heri Nov 7th 2007 in Business

Defensio is now live, with stickers, pastel colors and all sorts of web2.0 goodness. The new service promises to end spam if you are a blogger of if you manage a CMS. One of its mean features is that spam will be ranked by spamminess, allowing you to have a better view of potential spam and ham. It also has a better API for developers who want to use it for their application.

Spam is an ever-ending battle, with spammers using brute methods and new algorithms in hope to get trackbacks and get just one innocent visitor to various *health-enhancers* drugs or another money transfer scheme. Startups have tried, some failed, like Blue Security, an Isreali startup who got DDos by a russian spammer, some succeeded, like Akismet, which is now the “default” anti-spam plugin for bloggers. Defensio promises to learn and adapt their sorting algorithm for every new web destination. Here is a screenshot of the service, where it reaches 100% accuracy for a wordpress blog.

For me, Defensio has gone going back and forth from 95% to 98%. It’s far from the advertised 100%, although I admit it’s better than Akismet’s performance.

On a final note, Defensio is on digg now, if you have an account, you can help them get noticed.

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Montreal Tech Watch November 07, 2007

new post: Defensio promises to end evil spam http://tinyurl.com/yr28vk

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stephdau November 08, 2007

Dugg! :)

Tried it this afternon, but was having issues with the sign up service. The team was right on track though, because my bug report was immediatelt replied to and addressed, and all is working [quasi-]flawlessly i my tests now.

Planning to roll it our of my sandbox WP install, and into prod shortly.

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Alistair November 08, 2007

Great coverage, Heri (and thanks for the plug about the CakeMail coverage over on Web Worker Daily.)

BTW I met a bunch of the Blue Frog guys a few years ago — had some very interesting conversations with their CTO. I wrote about it (ages have gone past since then) here:
http://ac.micro.org/wp/?p=28

And then their foldup here:
http://ac.micro.org/wp/?p=132

Next time we’re in the same place I’ll tell you the dirty details over a beer.

Great stuff on Blitz. Lemme know if I can help.

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Heri November 08, 2007

Hi Alistair,

Thanks for passing by

I think Bue Frog had the wrong approach on fighting spam. you can’t win by “spamming” spammers. Ultimately, I think social filtering would be the key to solve the spam problem.

I am going to the Montreal Tech Breakfast btw, if you are going there.

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Defensio, the blog » Blog Archive » People Like Us! November 12, 2007

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