2017 has been an incredible year for Bulc Club. In the past twelve months, we’ve been fortunate enough to watch this labor of love grow in a number of very important ways. These accomplishments are 100% due to our Membership and we’re indebted to you for helping us in our mission of ending spam forever.
Membership
This year, our Membership has more than doubled. We know that with each new Member, marking and blocking spammers, the workload for the rest of us decreases exponentially. The power of Bulc Club is based on folksonomy. This is where a simple, quick action by one person benefits a substantially larger group of people. With traditional spam filtering systems, a user receives a spam email and drags it to their spam folder to ensure they never receive an email from this sender again. With Bulc Club, each time a Member clicks the “Block” button, the spam score (or Bulc Club Member Rating) increases. Email addresses with high enough ratings are automatically held in a queue for deletion for all our Members. The larger our Membership, the more spammers that are blocked, and the less work for the rest of us. With 2017’s surge in Membership, we’ve cast a much wider net in blocking spammers before they’re forwarded to Bulc Club Member inboxes.
Member Ratings
In the last twelve months, we’ve watched Bulc Club’s data grow to cover close to 60,000 email addresses and 46,000 mailserver domains. This means that our Membership spent the year scoring more senders than the entire population of Greenland. Each time our block button is clicked, we’ve stopped another spammer from ever reaching any other Member. If we continue to grow the way we have in 2017, we’ll be on the fast track of ending spam, once and for all.
New Features
Due to feature requests from our Membership, 2017 has seen Bulc Club grow to be more powerful than ever. In February, we developed the means for Members to limit forwarders to only receive email from one email address or one mailserver domain, crushing unsolicited email from personal data-sellers like LinkedIn and GoDaddy. Later that month, we released an online service spam prevention cheatsheet that made it easy for Members to protect themselves from 55 popular social networks and online services. We taught the public how to safeguard themselves from digital point of sale (POS) systems as more and more emailed receipts compromised their privacy. We launched a feature to block addresses with non-standard characters, a long-standing and unaddressed Outlook.com bug. We showed Members how to get unlimited free iCloud aliases, despite Apple’s current limit of merely three. And further following your enthusiastic feedback, we built new configuration options to make it easier to scan through and recognize spammers in your inbox listings.
Please keep the feature requests coming! Your feedback is invaluable.
Publication
This year, articles by Bulc Club were published, read, and shared through a number of esteemed industry blogs, including SitePoint and Medium. A Developer’s Guide to Managing Email Accounts was first featured on SitePoint in August and then shared on both WebDesignerNews and SpeckyBoy a month later. The New Paradigm Against Hackers: Email Addresses as Passwords was published, shared, and applauded on Medium in October. As we move forward into 2018, we’ll continue to publish our research, findings, and data on how we will dismantle the spam industry together. As always, you can see back-ups of Bulc Club publications on our news/press site, bulc.info.
Spammer of the Year
Each week, our followers on Twitter have seen statistics on the most prolific “Spammer of the Week” blocked by our Members. As we tallied up the results, the clear winner of the infamous Bulc Club 2017 Spammer of the Year Award goes to InstantCheckmate.com, who has sold and resold a Bulc Club Member forwarder 575 times! That’s almost twice a day in the entire year. Imagine individually blocking 575 messages from different email addresses and mailserver domains. With the click of one button, this Bulc Club Member capsized InstantCheckmate’s entire armada of spammers. More importantly, all 575 spammers are now blocked for every other Member. If InstantCheckmate weren’t so nefarious in their intent, we’d feel the urge to thank them for such a hearty push forward in ridding the world of spam, forever.
Summary
A few years ago, we created Bulc Club for ourselves because we were tired of getting spam. Soon, friends and family started asking for accounts, which paved the way to our exploding Membership this year. Thank you for helping us provide this free service by referring your own friends and family. Thank you for your encouragement and support in our difficult but worthy mission. Thank you for making 2017 such a successful year for us and we hope you’ll continue helping us fight the good fight against spam in 2018 and years to come. We’re changing the world together.