Could someone in the know let me know how to fix this crippling irritation?
Pressing the "issue resolved" button seemed to work for maybe one further report before it happening again.

Background:
One of my long standing ex-ISP e-mail accounts was finally closed recently, so I set myself up with an alternative Yahoo e-mail to replace it.
This was the account that I used for notifications from SpamCop, so I swapped the details over.
It started okay, but then I started noticing I wasn't getting notifications.
Upon visiting SpamCop, I saw this error.
How would I resolve this?
Also...
In preparation for the possibility that I may receive future spam in the Yahoo account, I tried adding it as a mailhost.
All host variant options return timeout errors, where the servers don't respond.
Also, the error reported by them is that I don't have an account?!
What is going on here?

Please consider that I don't really want to learn the entire the ins-and-outs of mail systems and protocols. I just want to click a few buttons and report scum - for everyone's benefit.

TIA for any input and help resolving this matter,

D3V

Hi, D3V!...I'm not certain but the error message appears to be saying that SpamCop tried to send an e-mail to your Yahoo account and Yahoo bounced it. Neither am I sure about what to do about it but my first thought would be to contact Yahoo!Mail support and ask if they can determine why e-mail from SpamCop would be bounced....Your best bet is to contact SpamCop at e-mail address service[at]admin.spamcop.net to ask for help with your MailHost configuration. They can see details that none of us SpamCop users here can see.

Have you tried adding SpamCop.net to your Yahoo white list?

If Yahoo continues to refuse to accept mail from SpamCop you could set up a separate account at another provider and forward that mail to your Yahoo account

I didn't know there was a whitelist!
Surely everything should be in a whitelist, unless I add it to a blacklist.
It's not up to Yahoo to filter my mail without first informing me. I'd rather do any filtering with Thunderbird, which uses a system which has proved far more solid and foolproof than any idiotic and flawed list system (of the like used by other providers such as Hotmail) that i have experienced in the past.
Thanks for the heads-up though. I'll look into it.
I was trying to avoid using one of my other accounts. They all have different purposes. I'd rather get this sorted besides this Yahoo oversight.
Cheers to you both for the replies so far,
D3V

Okay...
I haven't seen a whitelist option but I added the SpanCop DevNull address to my contacts within the online webmail settings.
Whilst there, I also found an option to enable POP3 which was unchecked, so I selected that too.
I then went back to SpamCop and pressed the button that resets the bounce flag.
I'll let you know.

There is a difference between the whitelist and your 'contacts'.

By adding to the whitelist you are specifically saying whatever arrives from this address, ignore all the spam checks and deliver it to my inbox whereas the blacklist is precisely the opposite.

Adding to your contacts will not, I fear, achieve what you have in mind.

You find the whitelist options in the webmail by following: Options, Spamcop Tools, Manage your personal whitelist.

Andrew

I am confused. I thought it was Yahoo that was bouncing the email. In Yahoo, go to Options->Mail Options->Filters->Add and add spamcop.net to go to your inbox. I don't know if that prevents it from bouncing, but it does prevent it from going to the spam folder.

I don't use yahoo that much, but it seems to me it is as capricious as hotmail for its filtering options. I don't think you will get very far with the initial contact with the help desk, if adding the above filter doesn't work. You might be able to find out what the problem is if you can talk to a supervisor - especially if the bounce message says there is no account.

Miss Betsy

[at]turetzsr:

Admin have contacted me requesting my login so that they can look into it.

I cannot yet contact Yahoo, as the page I saw asked for details that only SpamCop would know - I have no detailed knowledge of what is causing the bounce situation, only that, if I reset the flag, I still receive no report confirmations and find that the error returns, possibly with the next SpamCop email.



@dbiel & Miss Betsy:

I didn't think I would need to add a positive filter, as I have chosen the option for Yahoo to not filter anything. I try not to allow any webmail account to filter anything at their end before I receive it and allow Thunderbird to do my filtering for me. I don't like to chance not receiving mails before my client gets to download them.



@agsteele:

"There is a difference between the whitelist and your 'contacts'."
I know that, but it seemed the only possible option open to me to try. I hadn't considered the "filters" option was a whitelist and hadn't thought I needed it as I set the option to receive everything and not junk any spam Guard-deemed spam at all.
...Ah-hah!!! The whitelist you are referring to is a SpamCop one - no?
I do not have a SpamCop email account and the problem appears to be as Miss Betsy guesses. It's just my SpamCop report confirmations that are getting bounced by Yahoo and SpamCop is using this to set a flag which terminates the sending of further reports to an assumed problematic or defunct mail address until any issues are resolved and that address is fully functional or replaced by an alternative.



@Miss Betsy:

"I don't know if that prevents it from bouncing, but it does prevent it from going to the spam folder."
Yeah. The thing is, nothing is actually going to the spam folder anyway.

LOL @ the Hotmail comment. Don't I know it. I think it's better now but I seem to recall I only ever had the choice to set it to "low" filtering; not to disable it completely. I dunno; I haven't checked in a long time.

For some reason I have to manually fire up and run IE8 to get to that "option" dropdown menu to work! I resent this. IE won't work properly on my computer anyway, as I have two dangerous and unnecessary MS attack liabilities it relies upon - ActiveX and Windows Scripting host - totally disabled.
It just does nothing under FF3. I looks like it wants to but just sits there while my mouse pointer remains busy for a while. I tried it again with AbBlockPlus disabled and got the same result. I don't know if they're using something that I deemed dodgy and added to my ExExceptions rules. That may be it but I have no idea. My Flash and Java are up to date also.

Please note that the White lists being referenced are not the ones in a SpamCop email account but the ones in your Yahoo mail account.

Some ISP's reject what they considered "known" spam before looking at the user's white list, if this is the case then you have to contact your ISP admin to see if they can override the master filters that are doing the rejecting.

Most ISP's who reject "known" spam will look at the user's white list before rejecting it.

Other ISP's look at the user's preferences before rejecting anything.

There are some ISP's that do not give the user any choice regarding spam, they set there own rules as to what is acceptable and what is not, and the user is simply stuck with it.

It all depends on the individual ISP

It should be noted that some ISP also filter the outgoing messages

It gets back to the old rule, my server, my rules. Keep in mind that in some cases the only solution to the problem is to find a different provider that provides the services you require.

I used Firefox 3.0.10 and could see my yahoo mail box and the Options menu ok. I can also see it in IE7. However, I am not using yahoo classic. I don't have really tight security either - or as least as tight as you seem to have it. It might be tighter than some.

I don't see any place where I can choose the level of spam control in yahoo. Once, I sent an email with a MSWord attachment from my home address and it went to junk mail even though I have sent emails with the same kind of attachment before and since and there was no problem. All customer service would do is to recommend whitelisting.

In hotmail, I have it turned completely off. It won't even let me 'report' anything because I don't have it turned on. After the last upgrade, you could choose that instead of 'low' I think. However, none of the spam in an account I forward to a hotmail account ever makes it. A long time ago, a legitimate email didn't make it and just recently an email from a bank was marked as a phish, but it was there in my inbox, but otherwise everything is forwarded - including some spam that made it past the first account's filters.

I only know of one newsletter that had problems being accepted (according to the publisher even when people added it to contacts or 'allowed' it). I sent him the address that can be found on the hotmail help pages and apparently they fixed him up - the last email I got from him (other than the newsletter which arrives regularly) was grumpy, but I guess he decided to do whatever they asked him to. OTOH, several commercial emails that I used to receive regularly have disappeared. I haven't tracked them down to see what happened. I never whitelisted them the way I was asked to do.

Hope you figure it out. I think I have shot my wad on what I know about what to do.

Miss Betsy

What type of Yahoo account do you have and where is the whitelist option. I have the free account and have not seen any such option.

Same here and I don't see anything of the sort either.

Since I have been transient, and no ISP of my own (in this shared house the ISP is Bulldog - via the British Telecom infrastructure), I have decided upon only using free webmail/email accounts.
I have only three:-
Hotmail: for formal and any official stuff - as it's in my real name
Google: for music and associated profiles
Yahoo: for other general web-based shenanigans

As far as Thunderbird usage is concerned this setup is sometimes a pain.
For webmail accounts, you have to use add-ons that actually go to the respective webpages, login and fetch your mail. If the particular provider overhauls the design of the site, all Thunderbird users using these add-ons temporarily end up waiting for them to get updated to reflect the changes. Luckily for me, Hotmail has POP3 settings that (apparently) not every country can access - and not everyone knows about. Google has also and (I think) they are readily publicised. The free Yahoo account didn't, so I have been using the add-on method above, until I visited earlier and selected (the new) POP3 option, which has now conflicted with my webmail add-on settings - until I find the POP3 settings to replace that also.



@dbiel

Being that my accounts are all webmail, the ISP filtering thing shouldn't apply to me. Or could there be some other possible ISP privacy intrusion at play that I may not know about?



@Miss Betsy

Yeah. I have to use Classic, as that's what is required for the webmail add-on I use to be able to function. I'll alter that in a while, if I can find the POP3 settings for it.
Duh?... The "options" thing works fine for me in FF 3.0.10 now! They must've had a glitch at their end or something. My security hasn't changed at all.
I've just looked at the junk settings via the new Windows Live Hotmail site. I still only have the option for "low", not "off"!? although, at this setting, Hotmail never junks anything. All I have in my online folders are copies of mails I have already received that are now in my "deleted" folder. I don't know why this is, but it's not a "leave on server" type option set from within Thunderbird. They get properly deleted after a while anyway.
I don't think there is a spam level for Yahoo. Only SpamGuard on/off.

You are correct. There is only a 'low' option. However, I never get any email in my junk folder and when I try to report the spam that gets to my inbox, it always has a message that I can't report because I have filtering turned off. Am I imagining that? No, I found it (looking for a spam I might experiment with). I use Windows Live mostly rather than the web mail and I do have an option in Windows Live to turn it off completely. (I also discovered that it has a 'blocked domain list' so that you can block all email from .cn, etc. How about that?) I still have the 'report spam' checked, but it never lets me. I will have to try it from the web interface sometime.

My yahoo account is a paid account which I only access through webmail, but I thought that the only option under spam Guard was to send them to the spam folder or the inbox. Though I dimly remember another screen that seemed to have more options, but even though I found one thing researching this question, I don't want to push my luck! <g>

The options button in yahoo is on the right, not quite at the top. If you click it, it looks as though you can only choose color schemes, but at the bottom there is 'more options'

Miss Betsy

My reference to the Yahoo white list was only a general one to contrast between the SpamCop white list and the white list to be used by the other person and was a response to the following:

My reference to ISP was meant to mean E-Mail provider, sorry for the confusion. It should have read "filtering by your E-Mail provider."

Yahoo is bouncing the email to your account, with a "user unknown" error.

<xxx[at]yahoo.com>: host a.mx.mail.yahoo.com[67.195.168.31] said: 554
delivery error: dd This user doesn't have a yahoo.com account

- Don D'Minion - SpamCop Admin -
.

Have you tried sending a message from one of your other accounts to your yahoo account? Or checked the spelling on the one you submitted to spamcop? (I will fuss about not being able to access something and then discover, it's not the password - I mistyped the user name!)

Miss Betsy

[at]Miss Betsy:-

Aye, I agree with you, it does happen, but I also got there shortly before you. Still, you made me paranoid and I checked again just now.
Of course, there are two different entries for it - as a mailhost and as a contact address - but both are fine.
In fact, I needn't have bothered checking, as, one look at Thunderbird shows that it was working fine up until the 4th of May. The 5th being the first time I couldn't receive anything from SpamCop.

Don contacted me via an email to my Hotmail address just before he posted here. He said that there aren't actually any bounce details logged yet they have just modified SpamCop recently and was hoping this isn't related.
I copied the title of the post from the SpamCop reporting page. It's as written there: "...has returned a bounce: Subject:" and after "subject:" there is just a blank space.
As I said at the start of the topic (and Don mentions in his previous post) Yahoo is simply reporting that I don't have an account!?
I'll have to try what you suggest, and send a mail from myself to myself from one of my other accounts.

As a side note: I got the POP3 settings from Yahoo and changed Thunderbird accordingly. Now all three of my webmail accounts are POP'd, so there's no need for messing around with add-ons which fail to work and need updating when sites are altered... Finally. Yey!

...Sorry, my suggestion was not clear. What I intended to suggest was that you ask Yahoo!Mail admin why they are bouncing e-mail directed to you from SpamCop rather than to suggest you provide detailed information about the bounce situation to Yahoo!Mail admin. If they need more information from SpamCop, it would be up them (Yahoo!Mail admin) to get it -- you should only be expected to know how they can contact SpamCop, service[at]admin.spamcop.net or deputies[at]admin.spamcop.net.

The result of one sent from Hotmail via Thunderbird:-


The result of one send via GMail webmail (as Thunderbird would only be using my default Hotmail SMTP setting otherwise):-


So what is this email account that I actually log in to, if it no longer exists?!
Is this the part where I find out that Yahoo have simply blocked me, on account of me sending spam emails from my account [to SpamCop - you morons!!!!]?
Actually, I don't think I have. I always use the Hotmail SMTP for forwarding. I haven't really had the chance to use the Yahoo account yet.
So...
What do I ask them, guys?
How come I can actually have an account that I can log in to, and alter settings for, yet cannot use?
I'm pretty certain I haven't accidentally reported myself via a mistakenly spam-flagged genuine mail.
Is this gonna be like when MySpace banned me for... um... must've been looking at *god forbid* band pages! as I didn't do a lot else on there in terms of [ack!] social networking. They wouldn't tell me what I did. they wouldn't reply. I wouldn't expect much competence or sense from any Murdoch owned affair

OMG!!!...

I'll eat my hat, Miss Betsy.
I just tried a send test from the Yahoo webmail, to Hotmail, with a cc to GMail.
I'm really sorry, everybody, but...


...the domain was wrong!!!


Uh?!...

Hang on...

It wasn't my doing!

They've .co.uk'd me without notifying me!?
I was .com'd before!
I even have the Thunderbird receipts to prove it.

I've changed both the SpamCop mailhost and contact settings to the .co.uk address now.
I've also now confirmed the mailhost bot mails and the contact mail that were sent to me.
Fingers crossed.

Thanks for everybody's time and input.

At least a unique occurrence lesson has been learned. Unnecessary though it may have been.

This is one of the reasons why it is important to check outgoing reports. (note: does not apply to this specific case) These kind of changes do happen from time to time. Usually it is simply the servers that change, but in this case it was the domain name that changed, which could have easily resulted in you reporting yourself as your new domain name would probably be missing from your mailhosts configueration.

Damn!
Could sombody possibly mark this "unresolved" again?

I'm going to have to pass this over to the likes of Don now.
One thing I did notice - when i received my mailhost bot server confirmations - I receveid both a success and a failure for each one, timestamped the same:-

and...

The thing is, I forwarded the confirmations as I always have done, for a long time.
???

Done - I hope you mean forward as an attachment and not just clicking on the forward button.

That happens sometimes. I don't know why. Someday, when the engineers have less to do, I'll file a bug about it.

In the meantime, all you need to do is log into your account here, click on the Mailhosts tab, and check to see what hosts are registered. Most likely, the "failure" message was wrong.

If there is a problem, please write to me so I can help.

I need your login username so I can review your account.

- Don D'Minion - SpamCop Admin -
service[at]admin.spamcop.net

Both do the same thing here.
In Thunderbird there is a setting named "mail.forward_message_mode" found in the config editor which, if set to "0", means that ALL forwarded messages are sent as attachments, rather than inline.
You see them as such (as a .eml files in the attachment box) whether you choose to forward via a menu or just by clicking the corresponding arrow button.
I had to set this ages ago, to ensure error-free and easy forwarding of mails to SpamCop.
It now appears to be the default setting as it's not shown in bold, as settings appear when they have been altered by the user or any add-ons.

Don,
I have a lot of similar reports to send.
However, they are all complaining thus:-

Are these spam mails that you were sending whilst testing my account?
I've already tried to send a few reports - oops! but I guess it's okay as they appear to have nowhere to go!
Here is an example of one I haven't tried to send:-

Is it fixed again?
It seems fixed.
Thanks for adding yet another mailhost for me - if that's what was needed.
I don't know there are the two totally different Yahoo ones but that's for the experts like yourself to understand.
Cheers.

Yes.

You won't be able to report those spams because your hosts didn't handle the emails.

- Don D'Minion - SpamCop Admin -
.

Yes. Yahoo is a world wide organization and because of that, there are several Yahoo hosts.

You have two Yahoo hosts registered. YahooMain (14), which is the 14th host registered with our system, and BT Yahoo! Mail (10655), which seems to cover European Yahoo. That looks like an appropriate setup for you.

During the Mailhost system's infancy, we didn't understand the ramifications of letting the system make some of the decisions it did, and we didn't know how to prevent the creation of multiple hosts for the same network.

Our expertise has grown dramatically since then, so we don't have the "multiple hosts" problem as much as the old days, but there isn't any way to eliminate all the extra Yahoo hosts because there are so many different people using them.

- Don D'Minion -
.

I tried doing up a FAQ for the MailHost Configuration issues and problems .. stopped when I got no help from those involved. On the other hand, I had collected more than a few notes for this exact scenario ....
FAQ Entry: MailHost Configuration problems
Considering this was started back in 2005 and this exact issue was known then, the "when they find the time" seems a bit silly.