Hi folks. I just signed up for SpamCop but I am thoroughly confused. I'm having trouble understanding the entire thing and can't find any basic instructions anywhere. I would like to continue to use my regular email and have it filtered by SpamCop. Is that possible? If so, how? I use Outlook Express. If I can't set it up to filter my current email address, I'm going to cancel my subscription. So far, I am completely confused. Can anyone help me?

Thanks.
Robin

Certainly possible. You can have SpamCop pop and filter the e-mail and then forward it to you to be open on your regular mail console..

You only have to check and report the held mail either on held mail page or spamcop webmail. Intially you might have to whitelist certain mail which is erronously identified as spam.

Hope that helps, there are several threads and FAQ's that can be helpful as well as people with technical savy that can guide you along in this forum.

To feed the confusion factor, you really don't state what you "signed up" for, amongst the various types of SpamCop accounts. As you really said nothing about "paid for" ... one would have to guess that you've signed up to use the free reporting tool.


That would require signing up and paying for a filtered e-mail account.


Now you talk of a subscription. Did you sign up and pay for a filtered e-mail account? Haven't you looked at the Pinned FAQs here in this Forum to see the various methods and modes of setting up OE to interface with SpamCop e-mail, your ISP's e-mail, etc. ..??? If so, what isn't working?

That is possible in several configurations. I will describe the basics here. Please ask any additional questions you have along the way.

Account A is your current email address which you can continue to give to contacts. Account B is your spamcop account. Account C is an optional, alternate email account, preferably never given out and hard to guess as it wil not be filtered, possibly by the same ISP as Account A.

First we need to get the messages to spamcop for filtering. Some ISP's allow you to forward all messages to another account (Acount . This would depend on your ISP's options. Another way to get the messages to spamcop is to have spamcop POP your current Account A. Inside webmail, Options, Spamcop Tools, Configure external POP servers.

Next we need to decide where you want to read your messages. You can leave the messages on the spamcop servers and access them via webmail or a local IMAP cient (ie. Outlook Express) from server imap.spamcop.net. You can download the messages to your local machine via POP (ie. Outlook Express) from server pop.spamcop.net. You can also have spamcop forward the filtered messages to a different account (Account C) that you can access however you like.

A lot of information I know, but just take it one step at a time and ask your questions here and we can get you setup.

Start here to check your setup
< http://mail.spamcop.net/tips.php>
and here
<http://mail.spamcop.net/setup/setup.php>

After doing that consider this
Suggested setup for a start

(1) Log in using your FULL spamcop email address here
<http://webmail.spamcop.net/horde/imp>

(2) click "Options" at top of page

(3) in box "Mail Management" click "SpamCop Tools"

(4) click "Select your email filtering blacklists."

(5) uncheck box "Block All " and check all the boxes in box
"DNS Blacklist" and click "Blue Button" "Modify" underneath
I find that blacklist "dnsbl.sorbs.net" is for me agressive. You may uncheck any blacklist that is causing to many false positives (the Whitelist overides these blacklists. But will not override Virus detection Virus are deleted. You can turn notification of this off)

(6) have your provider forward your email to your spamcop address

(7) Setup your email client to collect (POP3) your email from spamcop.

In the POP3 box of your email client remove the one you have there and replace with "pop.spamcop.net"

(7a)You NOW need to whitelist your providers email servers for reporting spam (include your SpamCop email address). To do this go here and follow instructions (you logon with full email address and password)
<http://mailsc.spamcop.net/mcgi?action=mhedit>
If you have multiple email addresses you just need to submit one email for that domain (this is done to get around spammers forging headers)

(7b) If you use IMAP to access your email, please use the following names:
spamcop.net customers: imap.spamcop.net
You can disable "auto polling". If you do not a bell will ring every time a message hits your "held folder"

(8) Success you should now have all mail caught by filters in your held folder with only legitimate email in your inbox

(9)For logging into held folder
<http://mailsc.spamcop.net/reportheld?action=heldlog>
This will allow you to forward and whitelist innocents and Toast the guilty at a simple click of the mouse button

I would suggest you use password software for bettter security for logging in
http://www.password-depot.com/download.htm
This is basically freeware for 20 passwords/URLs
It also works flawlessly from a USB drive (good for shared computers)
Lockable by two wo completly different encryption methods (Blowfish AND Rjindael)

You then disable your personal computer to remember passwords and login (always uncheck this option on shared computers)

******************
To contact SpamCop go here
<http://mail.spamcop.net/>
<http://mail.spamcop.net/contact.php>

***************************

I have some questions. I'll be honest, I know very little about mail servers, so be gentle

I just purchased the Spamcop mail (cesmail.net) and I want to filter 3 different mail accounts. If this isn't possible, let me know, I was just trying to kill all my spam.

Anyways...

I set up all 3 POP accounts in the mail, but when I refresh the spamcop mail, I don't see the test emails or ANY email I'm sending to myself. However, if I look @ the original mail accounts, the test emails are there. I did get a few email from one POP account, but it took 3-5 minutes to show up. I checked and double checked the mail server names, user names and passwords.

Am I doing something wrong? Can I not do 3 accounts?

Thanks

bp

Your statement is a bit confusing.
you say
Are you refering to using
Options
SpamCop Tools
Configure external POP Servers
Which is where you would configure the system to POP other accounts. If so you would have noticed that it is setup to access 10 separate accounts.
It is best to set up your original 3 e-mail accounts to forward all mail to your new cesmail.net account. If that is not possible, then you have no choice but to have your new cesmail.net account POP your old accounts. Note: There is no limit to the number of accounts that can be forwarded to a single cesmail.net account.
I personally have all my mail forwarded, so do not have direct experience using POP, but remember that you need to allow a bit of time for the system to POP your accounts, it does not happen instantanously. Forwarding is much faster. If you log directly into the your new account (instead of trying to POP mail from it) it should force the system to POP all of your old accounts at that time, but remember that it does not happen instantanously.
You can have your cesmail.net account forward your mail to another account (instead of using POP to access it) but it must not be any of the accounts that you are trying to filter mail from.
You can also access mail using IMAP see http://forum.spamcop.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=152

Note: I have made one assumption, that cesmail.net uses the same interface as spamcop.net. If that is incorrect, ignore anything I have previous said.
Hope that this is helpful.

Brandon, this is the exact reply I gave you in PM before I found this post.

The POP system will never be an instant transfer because you are having the spamcop server check your email box on a schedule (just like you might at home). The message is received by your ISP and sits in your mailbox until someone pulls it out, either your desktop machine or spamcop.

Basically the spamcop machine is popping mail for everyone, one at a time. The spamcop machine starts popping each account (logging in, asking if there are any available messages, and downloading them) in its configuration (every spamcop mail account could have multiple pops setup) and when it finishes, it basically starts again. Sometimes it can take a long time between POPs, especially if there are large amounts of messages in peoples mailboxes or if the process has not run in a while for some reason. It seems to be averaging about 15 minutes between collection runs right now.

If you want the message to be sent to spamcop instantly, and to reduce the load on the spamcop systems, some ISP's let you forward all mail to your mailbox to another location. In this situation, your ISP accepts the message and immediately forwards it to (in this case) your spamcop account. The spamcop systems simply have to receive the message.

I hope this clears things up for you and post back with any further questions.

thx guys. I found that it just takes a little time for the mail to hit my spamcop account. I guess I'm just a little impatient and I was trying to test things to make sure I didn't make a mistake.

All is well.

.b.

Thanks for the reply. It is noce to see a case closed.