I am completely confused. I am not a power user or computers or email. Let's get that disclaimer right up front.

Many emails to me from friends and business associates are bouncing back to them and never making it to me. My ISP says it's because of spamcop, since they are listed as the URL on the bounced emails. Also, I receive a bunch of email bounce backs to me that are people that I have never written to. I don't know what those are. The ISP said maybe someone is using my email address illegally.

I looked up my IP address and it wasn't listed. The computer said that it was not a routeable IP address.

Now what? Is spamcop the one bouncing my emails? What happens now that my IP address doesn't seem to be listed?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
Amanda

You're going to have to come up with some of the numbers involved. The SpamCop DNSbl woks on the IP address of the source of the e-mail. So to start things off, please read the (work in pogress) FAQ about Why am I Blocked? ... This may help to explain what's going on, so you can then explain to your friends why their e-mail is getting blocked by your ISP (who is trying to do you a favor and keep the spam spew out of your InBox)

as far as your IP being non-routable, the first guess would be that you're on a high-speed cable connection ... but again, this is only a guess .. can't tell from here ...

If emails sent to you are bouncing it is because of a decision made by your email provider. SpamCop does not have the power or the authority to bounce the emails and it cannot control what your mail admin decides to accept or not accept.

Your mail admin seems to be using the SCBL to bounce emails, which isn't necessarily a good idea since SpamCop itself doesn't use the database to bounce emails, but it is your mail admin's decision to make.

If you can't convince your mail admin to whitelist the IPs your correspondents are sending from the only option is for you to receive their email using another service. There are plenty of free and low-cost mail services available on the web (Hotmail, Yahoo to name two). Just open an account and give the email address to your correspondents to use if/when emails to your primary account bounce. AFAIK neither of the services I mentioned use the SCBL but both do block potential spam so you might want to check some other services who may not use any filtering.

If your correspondents have long-term problems with email to you bouncing you should ask them to complain to their provider. The bounces indicate that spammers are using the same provider as your correspondents and only their provider can prevent the spammers from adversely affecting their ability to have their email delivered.

The bounces that your friends are getting are for a completely different reason than the bounces that you are getting.

As your ISP explained, the email service that your friends are using is not reliable because they are sharing the same IP address that a spammer is using and that their ISP is not doing anything about stopping the spammer from using that IP address.

They will have to use a reliable email service in order to email you. The simplest is to open a hotmail account, but there are lots of other options. They can complain to their ISP about the unreliability of their email service or they can permanently change their email service to another provider who is reliable.

The bounces that you are getting are because the spammer has forged your email address in the From part of the email. There is nothing you can do about that unless you learn more about how email works and even then, it is pretty much like spitting in the wind.

Another solution is for you to change email service providers to one that does not filter spam for you or uses a different filter than spamcop. Then, of course, as well as your friends' emails you will receive all the spam that comes from the same IP address. It seems to me that a true friend would not insist that you receive spam in order to get their email, but each to his own.

Miss Betsy

Amanda, it sounds like your friends email are bouncing coming to you if I am reading your post corectly. Either way if it is your friends or your email that is bouncing going to them you will have to post one of those bounce messages so someone here can help you.

Merlyn:

Thanks for the tip to copy a message from a friend:

A message (from <PERSON[at]comcast.net>) was received at 20 Apr 2004 14:13:21 +0000.

The following addresses had delivery problems:

<amanda[at]SOMETHING.com>

Permanent Failure: 530_5.7.1__Blocked:_See_<URL:http://spamcop.net/bl.shtml?204.127.202.55>:_amanda[at]SOMETHING.com

Delivery last attempted at Tue, 20 Apr 2004 14:13:21 -0000

That's it. PERSON is on comcast, obviously. The other person is work, who's on something local.

Thanks, everyone, for all the help you've given me. I've written to my ISP for more details.

Amanda

some IP on comcast has been spewing out a lot of spam lately...maybe your friend' machine is infected..

If I were you, I'd edit the above message to remove the email addresses! It's best not to post such things in public places - where they can be harvested by spammers...

That's a comcast server: 204.127.202.55 It was listed but is no longer listed.