if i get 10,000 - 20,000 spam messages at once, which has happened to me twice in the past three months, the web interface only lets me see 100 messages at a time, and it takes a while before it refreshes with the next 100 when i delete the ones i can see... it would be nice if there was some way to deal with all of the messages at once, especially when 99.98% of them are the same message. if i could see all 20,000 messages, i could delete them all at once, rather than having to go through them 100 at a time. is there some way to manage this?

Not sure that this qualifies as a 'good' new feature request, as there are already buttons, links, and methods in place to handle this situation. See the latest 'instructions' provided in the specifically associated/dedicated e-mail support Forum section at http://forum.spamcop.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=10030

Just noting that the referenced Topic was also pointed to specifically in the last Announcement entry .....

i may have been a spamcop member for a while, but i can see no clue as to where to complain, or how specifically to deal with the fact that my held mail box has a crapload of spam that i have to clear out.

i am not that dense, in spite of the fact that i am a survivor of a traumatic brain injury, but at the same time, if you talk in jargon that i can't understand, i'm as clueless as if i was... make this better for everyone rather than expecting everybody to talk exactly the way you do.

And the actual explanation/meaning of your tirade is what exactly???? I can't make much sense out of your words. Just what "jargon" are you possibly complaining about?

Is this the jargon that you are having a problem with?

BTW means By The Way. I don't know what IMAP stands for, but it is a way of getting mail and should be a choice in your email application. IIRC means If I Remember Correctly. SA is spam Assassin. And the OP (Original Poster) has explained YAM. The poster here is just another user trying to help out.

If you are wondering about getting more spam than held mail in general and not specifically because of this mass mailing, then you need to look at whitelists (have you whitelisted your own address?) and how to tweak your filters. The discussion about whitelists is a fairly recent one. There have been others on filters in the past. I do not have an email account so I don't know much about it, but there is probably a FAQ.

Good Luck.

Miss Betsy

actually the "jargon" that i was referring to was stuff like this:


what do spamhaus.org, abuseat.org and the others have to do with my question? i can't complain there, and they are not a part of spamcop, so they don't know how to clean the crapload of spam out of my held mail box, and i know that if i complain to n.a.n-a.s or n.a.n-a.e nothing will be done and i'm likely to be laughed out of the group. my "tirade" is from having been a spamcop member for a while (since 2004, at least) and always getting essentially the same response every time i post on the forum with a question.

i've been a software tester for 10 years, and have worked specifically with the electronic communication industry for 5 years and i can't understand most of what is spouted on these forums, because the jargon used is enough different from what i am used to that, now that i also have a brain injury, it's really easy for me to get confused.

the answer to my question - this time - is at the bottom of the thread, and Wazoo linked to the top of the thread. i'm tempted to say TLDR (Too Long, Didn't Read), but it turned out that the actual answer actually was contained within the page that Wazoo linked to. it would have been better, if it were possible, for him to link directly to the post which contained the answer that i was looking for, so that i didn't have to wade through a bunch of meaningless (to me) chatter that didn't actually apply...

does that explain things a little better?

That "jargon" is all standard to the overall topic of spam fighting and appropriate in the context in which it was posted. The forums here are primarily about fighting spam, along with a secondary focus on the needs of the email customers. Sometimes you have to read through a bunch of unrelated stuff to find what applies to your own specific needs, but that's very common online.

DT

agreed, but in the case of my question, completely irrelevent. to a person who is confused more easily, for whatever reason, sometimes it's enough to make them give up and do things the hard way just to avoid more confusion...

how much more difficult would it have been for him to link here

http://forum.spamcop.net/forums/index.php?...ost&p=68804

rather than here

http://forum.spamcop.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=10030

?

I agree that if the answer is contained in a specific response, that linking directly to that response, as opposed to the entire thread would be more helpful.

DT

Not only people with traumatic brain injuries have problems in getting the information they want from 'the irrelevant' to them, but not to the people who work with email and spam fighting. Both kinds of people come here so that the best thing to do is to ask again if you are bewildered (without, if possible, getting critical). All the jargon is important to more serious spam fighters (and those who run servers).

Another thing to keep in mind is that we are all 'users' - none of us have jobs at spamcop. If I am not in a hurry, then I might take more time to find and link or copy the information I think might help you. OTOH, if I am in a hurry, I might just tell you that the information you want is in a recent post - I might not even look up the topic title.

So, Yes, it would have been nice of Wazoo to direct you to exactly the post you needed, but he has elderly parents he helps plus several neighbors, and does computer repair and if you look at some past posts of his you would find a lot of other things he does as well as doing a professional job at keeping this forum running (for no pay - he is a volunteer).

In fact, he did go out of his way to even link you to the topic. He usually tries to help the poster find it himself - sort of teach a man to fish attitude. He, often, feels that his efforts to make sure information is available is completely ignored by posters. On a users' forum such as this new posters should be aware that there are all kinds of personalities. Wazoo is one of the most generous 'helpers' I know, but he has his own style.

I am the token 'technically non-fluent' regular poster and I have a lot of empathy with someone who has a problem and can't find the answer he wants - which is why I took the time to copy the post I thought you needed - not that it was needed since apparently you did find it yourself. Will that make me wait next time to see if the poster figures it out? Maybe. Like Wazoo, I like to get feedback that my posts are useful (his announcement post about spamcop email issues which he obviously hoped would be read by those who were having a problem and who, then, would not have to post, for instance).

It might not be a bad idea to familiarize yourself with the forum and the information here so that next time when you are frustrated by a problem (which naturally makes one more impatient), you will know where to look and how to phrase your problem for a quick answer.

Miss Betsy

while i appreciate people like wazoo and you for pointing me more or less in the right direction (enough that i was actually able to figure out the answer to my question, eventually), i'm also very busy with a life that, now that i am a brain injury survivor, doesn't involve computers anywhere near as much as it used to. not that i'm unable to use them, i'm just a lot more involved in other things. i'm not a frequent poster here, because for the most part, i expect that things like spamcop are just going to work, and i have enough technical knowledge to help me get to the bottom of most problems i have. when i don't, i post a question here. i wonder how many other people, like me, there are who don't even bother posting a question at a place like this...

Ahhhh, but they are a part of your SpamCop.net email account filtering choices. That was what the question was... what are your filtering options set to? These are my settings:

SpamAssassin: SpamAssassin checks your incoming mail against a variety of rules and assigns a spam score. The higher the score, the more likely it is that this email is spam. This option is recommended, as it can help block the few spams that the SpamCop blacklist won't block. Start with a score of 5 and adjust up or down as needed. A lower score will catch more spam, but will catch a few more legit emails.
SpamAssassin SpamAssassin Limit 5

Block Russian: This option will block most Russian email (and other email in Cyrillic characters) and send it to your Held Mail, whether or not it is spam. Only select this if you do not receive any legitimate Russian emails.
Block Russian: [checked]

DNS Blacklists: Select the DNS Zone blacklists you want to use. DNS blacklists are used by SpamCop to identify possible spamming IP addresses or misconfigured mail relays. Only the SpamCop blacklist is run by SpamCop. All others are run by independent third parties with no connection to SpamCop and have their own criteria for who to list. The default selection is to query only the SpamCop list. To potentially stop even more spam, try one or more of the other lists. The more lists you use, the higher the potential that legitimate email will be blocked.
DNS Blacklist DNS Zone Website
[checked] SpamCop Blacklist bl.spamcop.net www.spamcop.net/bl.shtml
[checked] Spamhaus Blacklist sbl.spamhaus.org www.spamhaus.org/sbl/
[checked] South Korea (the country) korea.services.net korea.services.net
[checked] China (the country) cn.countries.nerd.dk countries.nerd.dk/more.html
[checked] Nigeria ng.countries.nerd.dk countries.nerd.dk/more.html
[checked] Argentina ar.countries.nerd.dk countries.nerd.dk/more.html
[checked] Brazil br.countries.nerd.dk countries.nerd.dk/more.html
[checked] Composite Blocking List cbl.abuseat.org cbl.abuseat.org
[checked] Spamhaus XBL xbl.spamhaus.org www.spamhaus.org/xbl/
[checked] Spamhaus PBL pbl.spamhaus.org www.spamhaus.org/pbl/

um... no, that wasn't what my question was at all...

my question was, is there a way for me to delete more than 100 messages at a time from my held mail box... the answer is yes, and the answer can be found here - http://forum.spamcop.net/forums/index.php?...amp;#entry68804

I started a Dictionary, a Glossary, and then added a Wiki to try to handle the "jargon" problem. Others, with specific and emphatic thanks to debiel, have worked to populate those additional tools. Links are found at the top of this page.

On the other hand, I had posted a new Announcement, I had made a Reply over in the newsgroups ... bot posts dealt with the exact same issue you raised here. So at the time, I already had the URL link to the Topic in my notes. Doing some searching, writing up some other notes about needing a FAQ/Wiki entry, etc. Call me lazy, but .... three Replies/Posts to queries about the same subject in two different venues, posting the Announcement, my own work, in addition to whatever else I had going at the time ... please excuse me for taking a shortcut or two.

for which i am grateful, except when the jargon is totally secondary to the question i had.

if i had been asking, as SteveUnderwood apparently thought, about email filtering, then i would have made use of said links and probably not even posted a question at all, but when i ask a question about whether or not it is possible for me to delete more than 100 emails at a time from my held mail box, it is totally useless, and even more useless when the answer is peppered with jargon that doesn't apply.

and i wasn't finding it, because neither the post in announcements nor the reply in newsgroups addressed the problems that i was asking about using terminology that i could understand.

instead of saying "you'll find the answer on this page somewhere" you said something about whether or not it was a good suggestion for a new feature, and said that "instructions" could be found at a thread which you linked to the top of, which i eventually found at the bottom of.

as i said, sometimes that is all someone like most of my clients need to do things the hard way because of the fact that experienced people in the forums don't know how to answer questions in a way that they can understand.

New, or infrequent, posters who come here with a problem - especially those who are not familiar with the scope of spam fighting - often complain of not finding information. In addition, some English as a second language people have difficulty in understanding answers or in phrasing a question.

Regular posters have tried various ways to provide help for those people. The most notable are the FAQ and Glossary.

As I said before, all of us are volunteers with various demands on our time. If you can suggest better ways to provide help for people who are not familiar with user forums, please give us some insights.

Better yet, stay around and help those who need it!

How, for instance, do you lead a newcomer to the forum to the right topic to post in? What would have helped you to look at 'Spamcop email' forum rather than the 'New Feature' forum?

What would have helped you to look at the Announcements first? Or at more recent posts to see if others were having a problem? If you had done any of these things, you would not have had to post at all.

The reason there are two definitions of a User to User Support forum at the top of every page is because I argued that support is not 'peer-to-peer' since there is everyone from server admins to end users posting here. Most of the end users, like me, are totally ignorant of terms and processes that the server admins use every day. I thought the peer-to-peer intimidated end users who encountered a 'technical' post in looking for answers.

Whatever ideas you have to improve the help would be appreciated (aside from asking volunteers to take more time which sometimes happens and sometimes does not. It is also useless to ask posters to be professional help desk people. I like to use the term 'shade tree mechanics' to describe the kind of help one gets here.)

So, someone else who is 'non-technically fluent' would be a great help to new posters as well as being able to see with new eyes the help that we have developed and where it could be improved.

Miss Betsy

Actually, the "good suggestion for a new feature" comment was based on the fact that the empty folder button exists within the web-mail application. This is above and beyond the other approaches, such as an IMAP (Internet Messaging Application Protocol) connection, or simply doing it manually, etc. Blame my lack of imagination for not quite seeing the need for a 'new feature' to perform the requested action.

To which I can only respond .. we try, we try, we try ....

And to expand upon that even further, I had a Vista-based laptop here a number of days back that was in very bad shape. I spent a couple of hours looking for some answers for a few of the issues I'd run across. The problem I kept running into is literally thousands of places (newsgroups, Forums, Mailing List Archives, Personal web-pages, on and on) where the exact issue I was querying had been asked about ..... but in most cases, no response whatsoever, or actually even worse, wrong and/or bad answers provided. I take much pride in the fact that this Forum doesn't work like that.

You may have considered some answers 'bad' ,,, but I suggest quite the alternative ... folks were trying to take alternate approaches in trying to answer what they were guessing as to what might be behind the situation that caused you to bring up the query (in this case, suggestion/request) ... just as in the reasoning for my typical suggestion to "look at the FAQ" there has been quite an opportunity within this Discussion for a lot of 'new' information to have been provided. Granted, it may not have been the 'direct' answer to your initial post, but .... the use and configuration of various filter/tool settings may have led to a scenario where you may not have ran into the "thousands of e-mails in my folders" situation in the first place ...????

being one of the infrequent posters, my impression is that you would make a lot better impression, particularly when addressing questions posted by people who "don't speak the language very well" (be they infrequent posters, brain injury survivors, ESL people or what have you) if you:

1) don't treat everybody like they understand what you're talking about, unless you know that they understand what you're talking about. it is a lot easier for a technical person to say that they're a technical person than it is for a person who doesn't understand to say that they don't understand. it's a lot easier to say you're smart than it is to say you're dumb.

2) keep the jokes and aside comments to a minimum unless you know that the person you're responding to can understand them.

3) address the questions people have with consistent terminology: for example, wazoo gave me the link to the page i was looking for, but because he didn't use the same terminology i was looking for, i was only able to find it well after most of my clients would have given up because they couldn't understand what he was saying.



i'll do what i can, but i can't guarantee anything. we're just getting to one of the most busy times of the year in terms of performances i've got to play in: i've got a recording session tomorrow, i'm going to play in portland for national kazoo day on saturday, and i've got the moisture festival rehearsals, and then performanceds that i have to attend. i'm not sure how much i will actually be able to login and just peruse the forums...



honestly, i don't know from the outside... i looked in the "spamcop email" forum (as well as all of the others) and couldn't fnd any topic that looked even remotely close - of course i looked only briefly and didn't go very deep at all, because i was looking for a solution to my immediate problem, and didn't want to get distracted...



i did look at the announcements first, and i still haven't been able to find the link that wazoo said he put there! using consistent terminology would probably have helped that a little, but i'm not sure.



i'm not sure i'm the person you want for this task: as i said, i have been a test engineer for 10 years, and i have worked with the electronic communications industry for 5 years. i have set up email servers from scratch, and i very likely tested the software that sends and receives email from your cell phone, if you have a cell phone that sends and receives email. i know the jargon, but, because of the fact that i'm also a brain injury survivor, i get confused fairly easily, especially when the jargon used isn't relevant to the problem i have.



the problem is that, except for my spamcop settings, i don't use web-mail at all. i'm getting the impression that i may be part of a vanishing breed, but i use an email client on my local computer instead of using the web-mail interface, and i didn't know that feature was there.

also, once i found it, i discovered that it's NOT A BUTTON it's a menu selection - it's that old "consistent terminology" idea: if i had been looking for a button, i'd still have a crapload of spam to delete, and i would be several days more frustrated than i am, which affects my ability to engage in civil conversations with just about anyone (ask my wife).

And, that's the crux of the matter, IMHO. Many posters come here already cranky and impatient because of a problem. And there isn't much anyone can do to help them be more patient so that they either find what they want or don't get more impatient if the answer is not immediately given to them (for whatever reason).

My experience is that it doesn't matter a bit what you assume about a person's technical level - if you guess wrong, they don't like it - especially if they are already cranky about a problem.

Terminology is another big problem - both in searching for an answer and in answering a question. That's one of the reasons for a user forum instead of a help desk - different posters may give different interpretations.

I hope you will come back when you have time. Knowing how it feels to be the questioner is bound to give you insight in helping someone understand - whether they need technical advice or help in understanding what the problem is and where the answer can be found.

Miss Betsy

personally, i feel as though consistent terminology is the primary difference between a helpdesk and a user forum... and it's one of the big disadvantages to a user forum, in this regard. if the user forum contained a bunch of people who all used the same terminology, then it would be much easier to find an answer, even if the person asking it is not aware of the techological terms for the thing they're wondering about.

for example, here i could ask a question of 10 different people and get, maybe 8 to 10 different answers, one of which may be the solution i was looking for. on the other hand, if i called a helpdesk such as the one i used to work for (before i became a tester), and asked the same question to 10 different helpdesk technicians, i would very likely get 10 identical answers, perhaps worded a bit differently, but all of which would ultimately lead me to the same solution.

it gets really confusing when, for example, the one post that i was able to find with the term "mail bomb" - http://forum.spamcop.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=9840 - actually didn't contain the answer i was looking for, and the term "mail bomb" didn't come up once in the thread that preceded this, whereas i'm pretty sure that what we are talking about here is a "mail bomb" and everyone (apart from StevenUnderwood) was obviously aware of it.

it also gets really confusing when the feature that i'm looking for is called a "button" when it's clearly not a button. if i didn't know that he meant a menu selection (in other words, if i didn't know he was not using the correct terminology for the item he was describing), then i might still be looking for a button... or i would have given up and deleted the spam the hard way, 100 messages at a time.

Once again, back to the black arts of search magic. The only way to get everyone to use the same terminology is to train everyone to the same standard. Not going t happen.

Part of that is also based on the words used when asking the question. You say jargon, I say semantics. For example, your starting post specifically talked about the web-mail interface (describing the (alleged) 'limit' of 100 messages at a time.) Yet, one of your last posts makes a complaint that others here seemed to make an assumption that you used the web-mail interface.

Yes, one could call it that, but as you've noted, no one that received that bundle of joy used that term .. I actually can't remember the last time I actually saw that term being used, The closest word I can recall would be "flood" ...

Just noting, the "instructions" you found made it clear that it was a menu selection .. my use of the word "button" was during a short explanation of why I didn't think that your request was a "good" new feature request. OK, I should have used the word "function" ... my point here is that my use of the word "button" was long after the fact .... you already knew that I screwed up .... I'll admit it also ... Maybe if I didn't have 20+ windows opened up on several systems here, connections to other servers around the world, maybe I'd make fewer errors of this type .. yet I have this feeling that I'd end up being yelled at for other reasons <g>

the 100-message limit is with the interface for reporting spam on the web - http://mailsc.spamcop.net/reportheld - the web-mail interface is, in fact, limited to 20 messages at a time - something that i found out while trying to make sense out of the jargon-filled semi-answer which you gave as your first reply to my question.



"mail bomb" or "mail flood" wouldn't have made any difference: my search still would not have come up with a link that answered my question.



in response, i'd like to quote your own words:



not a "button", not a "link"... yeah, it's a "method in place" but so is deleting spam messages manually 100 at a time. it's not one that i particularly enjoy, however, especially when i've got rehearsals and recording sessions to get to, and there's 20,000 emails to deal with...

i noticed that this message contains quotes which aren't formatted correctly, but to be honest, i don't have the time to go throught the code and figure out where my mistakes are. it's this damn non-HTML that's confusing me, and i've got other things to do. hopefully you'll be able to catch my drift anyway... figured it out...

Actually, the webmail interface is configurable, which is described somewhere in the FAQ.

Options, Mailbox and Folder Display Options, Messages per page in the mailbox view. and can be set to 999. I have mine set to 10, but I don't get many emails.

And to clear up my earlier, out of context message, I was thinking of the other thread that was referenced by the link.

instead of deleting 100 messages 200 times, i can delete 999 messages 20 times... it's a step in the right direction...