Geek Posted April 20, 2009 Share Posted April 20, 2009 I had already sent this before I noticed my email was still in the content and not an "x" as it usually is under the "Make sure theis is spam" header http://www.spamcop.net/sc?id=z2810103451za...1f2c328fbc9dc2z I'm wondering how often it's gone out unmunged? Should I manually mung them from now on? Cheers! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Miss Betsy Posted April 20, 2009 Share Posted April 20, 2009 I haven't examined your example carefully, but sometimes, particularly in the content, spamcop misses your email address to be munged. IMHO, there is very little incentive to mung spamcop reports. Extensive anecdotal investigation seems to conclude that there is very little difference in the amount of spam received using munged and unmunged submissions. Unmunged reports often cannot be used by ISPs to terminate accounts (considered by lawyers as 'tampered with' evidence). It also makes it more difficult for responsible server admins to investigate, I think. And if the spammer wants to know your email address, there are dozens of ways that he could code the email so that he knows - it would take too long to find and eliminate them as well as probably not being able to submit them because of 'material changes' In the beginning, spammers did take specific revenge on spamcop reporters. However, there are too many reporters nowadays to make that worthwhile. The most they do is harvest all the email addresses found in a spamcop report and add them to lists. Since most spammed addresses are already on multiple lists, it doesn't make a great deal of difference in the amount of spam. Another reason, reporters, in the beginning, wanted munging, was to avoid being listwashed. Again, nowadays, it makes very little difference because of the number of reporters and spam traps. Even if a spammer does listwash reporters, there are enough other ways that they are identified so that they are on some blocklist somewhere. Miss Betsy Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rconner Posted April 20, 2009 Share Posted April 20, 2009 Should I manually mung them from now on?This seems to be OK by SpamCop (see http://www.spamcop.net/fom-serve/cache/283.html), so yes you can if you think this would be useful. -- rick Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Farelf Posted April 20, 2009 Share Posted April 20, 2009 ...I'm wondering how often it's gone out unmunged?It's a known case - when your address is spoofed as sender it is liable not to be munged (the surest thing is therefore to assume it won't be). But of course it is not all that 'well known'. There's been quite a bit of discussion about it previously.Should I manually mung them from now on?That is certainly permitted (as Rick indicates) but I would agree with Miss Betsy - usually a waste of effort. I took a very long time to convince myself of that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wazoo Posted April 20, 2009 Share Posted April 20, 2009 I had already sent this before I noticed my email was still in the content and not an "x" as it usually is under the "Make sure theis is spam" header. I'm wondering how often it's gone out unmunged? Should I manually mung them from now on? What I see is that the To: address was in fact munged, which suggests that "your" address wasn't seen there. It was some other address that the parser munged out, looking for "that" address. This seems to be OK by SpamCop (see http://www.spamcop.net/fom-serve/cache/283.html), so yes you can if you think this would be useful. And as amended by further discussion at http://forum.spamcop.net/scwik/SCMaterialChanges Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rconner Posted April 20, 2009 Share Posted April 20, 2009 And as amended by further discussion at http://forum.spamcop.net/scwik/SCMaterialChanges Hate to bring it up, but we have: It's OK to remove any personally identifying information wherever it appears in the headers or text of the spam.followed hard upon by Altering spam headers is absolutely not allowed.So, if one's address appeared in a for-clause in a Received: line, would removing it be OK or not? -- rick Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wazoo Posted April 20, 2009 Share Posted April 20, 2009 followed hard upon by So, if one's address appeared in a for-clause in a Received: line, would removing it be OK or not? Per Don's last, the munging of that specific data is allowed. That does not translate into "removal of the whole line" which gets into why the expansion of the clarification came into being. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Geek Posted April 21, 2009 Author Share Posted April 21, 2009 Hi Wazoo, Nope, I don't remove the whole line. I just "Find/Replace" my email with an "x", like the parser usually does Cheers! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Geek Posted April 24, 2009 Author Share Posted April 24, 2009 It's been a few days of manually munging the worst ones and I have a 50% reduction in spam. Manually munging your email... it works folks, it works! Cheers! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lking Posted April 24, 2009 Share Posted April 24, 2009 Congratulations Geek! I'm glad you have found something that works for you. A year or so ago the issue was reporting/not reporting and how much spam you got. So for a month I counted spam by type, SW, drugs, phishing, stocks, etc. and didn't report at all. Then I reported everything for a couple of months still counting. The results were that my spam rate, over time, went up just like everyone else's as reflected by the SpamCop report charts. Going back and looking at the data I see daily spam rates of ~400 and ~175 a day during a month. I would suggest before you draw any hard conclutions you need to count for an extended time. If you want to look at my numbers check my old spam charts. October was the month I did not report. Some of the bumps, over time, are due to my ISP adding and removing spam filtering. It took me a while to convince them not to filter my mail, (at that time their faults positives were high). Speaking of ISP filtering have you checked with your ISP? If they filter out more than 1 or 2 or don't give you a count of what they block or through on the floor, your numbers are just a guess. The quality of filtering, day to day, varies widely. If you don't know the number blocked, your numbers don't reflect the total spam addressed to you. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Geek Posted April 24, 2009 Author Share Posted April 24, 2009 Hi Lou, I had my ISP completely turn off filtering and my own server, I've turned off filtering... the more spam I get, the more I can report and the mor that hopefully get shut Maybe I should start a log like you did. The "spikes" have been all over the place as of late. Cheers! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lking Posted April 25, 2009 Share Posted April 25, 2009 It's been a few days of manually munging the worst ones and I have a 50% reduction in spam. the more spam I get, the more I can report and the mor that hopefully get shut If you want more spam to report, why do you spend the time to manually mung? If you stay on their list you can help keep them on the SCBL. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Geek Posted April 25, 2009 Author Share Posted April 25, 2009 If you want more spam to report, why do you spend the time to manually mung? If you stay on their list you can help keep them on the SCBL. Because there's a difference between shouting "fire phasers" or "Collision course, ramming speed!" at the spammers Cheers! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Miss Betsy Posted April 25, 2009 Share Posted April 25, 2009 My, not-scientific, experience was that if I was taken off one list, after a short time, I started receiving a different kind of spam in the same quantities - which probably means that my address was sold as a 'live' address. A long time ago, when spammers did care if they were reported, I was extremely careful to mung with one persistent spammer (I had even tracked the spam so that I knew the spammer's name) and he still figured out how to listwash me. As I said, if they want to know, they can identify your report without using email addresses. Munging has two purposes: one to avoid retribution (which doesn't happen anymore because there are too many reporters except perhaps to add addresses to as many spam lists as possible - why else would they spam spamcop.net addresses?) and the other is to avoid listwashing so that IP addresses remain on the scbl (again, there are so many good filters for server admins to use today besides the scbl and so many other reporters that there is little point to avoid listwashing). In addition, I am not the only one to notice that sometimes one kind of spam stopped and a short time later another started. Not munging does not increase the amount of spam one gets and munging doesn't decrease it overall. If not munging increases it by spammers adding it to many lists, there is just more spam to report. There just is no way to /stop/ being spammed if once your address is spammed. Nevertheless, if that's what you want to do, have a good time! I enjoyed trying to mung everything. Miss Betsy Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Geek Posted April 25, 2009 Author Share Posted April 25, 2009 ...which doesn't happen anymore... Actually, I just talked with my ISP security guy and that's not true at all. I know that it's not true either. There's automated scripts for everything. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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