I was searching the forums to see if there was anything I could do to cut down on the amount of spam I have been receiving from China and South America. Apparently ISPs in these regions just don't give a fig about spam reports and the spam keeps coming.

BTW, the only spam I get anymore comes from those regions, so I have to assume the North American spammers have learned their lesson about sending spam to either my address or spamcop.net in general. Kudos to SpamCop for that!

Anyway I read something about the greylist feature (don't remember where offhand), so I enabled that and I now get absolutely zero spam, not even in my Held Mail folder. I miss the days of reporting people and getting a message back from a sysadmin saying their account was suspended, but if the reports are going to be ignored anyway then the greylist method is fine with me.

Great to hear of your success Syndil. It would seem that just about all of your spam has been coming from botnets or other 'direct to the internet' senders. The botnets are a problem for the internet and, while SC reports might assist 'white hat' providers in tracking down infected/trojanned user machines for the benefit of their customers and the internet at large, the greater number of them don't really seem make any sort of effort. So, no-one should feel bad about reducing their reporting as a consequence of using greylisting. There are specialists happily working away at the ways to discover and dismantle entire botnets while the command and control of these things (their weak link) is being continually 'evolved' to beat them. All very complex. I'm thinking we're, of necessity, merely spectators anyway.

The greylisting detail is documented in the pinned topic in this SpamCop Email System & Accounts forum - http://forum.spamcop.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=8650

SpamCop Email allows whitelisted email to go straight to your inbox without the 30 minute wait

Don't know how Gmail do it as they are extremly good at keeping spam out of their/your inbox's and no need for whitelisting and they do not use Greylisting
If one does wish to report Gmail spam that does get through to a email client is apparently problematic? I just use thr WebMail version which makes it easy to report

I rarely got spam in my actual inbox before I enabled greylisting--it was my Held Mail folder that would fill quickly. With Gmail it's the spam folder that junk gets sent to.

My problem was not that I was getting too much spam in my inbox. It was that I seemed to be getting the same spam on a daily basis--in my Held Mail folder--and that reporting it as spam did not seem to reduce it. Greylisting prevents the spam from reaching my Held Mail folder in the first place, so I don't waste time reporting it. I could easily just ignore my Held Mail folder and let the messages expire, but I don't. I always report the spam in my Held Mail folder.

I am keeping a close eye on my pending greylist, and there are a few companies that send me offers that I have had to allow through the greylist, but I figure after a few weeks of watching it closely I should be ok as far as email getting in that I want to get in.

@Farelf: Thanks a bunch for all the info. I feel I have a better understanding of what's going on, and that's always a good thing.