Hi all - hope this is not off topic..

I notice over the last week that I'm getting up to a dozen or so spams a day through to the inbox, where up until now I'd have been lucky (so to speak) to see one or two a day.

Is there a known issue with some new spam hosts / relays taking time to get blacklisted or is there another reason / suggestion as to why this might be happening?

Just curious since until now the track record for filtering spam has been so good!! (you guys spoiled me :^)

If I could also ask you more experienced users what the preferred action to take with help mail is? I get about 100 a day in the held mail and have long since stopped bothering to cull this folder for messages to "report as spam"...

Do you prefer that all "held mail" that is spam be "reported" ? (IE is my lack of reporting a contributing factor to the problem above? !!!)

Thanks for your time..

Brad

Not reporting your Held Mail is a small contributing factor to the increase in spam. If you have time, please report your Held Mail. For SCBL-unlisted sources, it will help to get them listed. For SCBL-listed sources, it will help them to stay listed longer.

Brad,

There's a couple factors in play here.

First, total spam is exploding. Look at the second graph on this page: http://bloodgate.com/spams/stats.html and you'll see that spam is up something like 500% in the last year. Also see http://www.tesp.com/tespUBErate.htm and the other graphs available at his site.

That means that even if we catch the same percentage as always, the amount that gets through to your inbox will increase. In the 18 hours or so since I cleared out my Held Mail, I've received over 200 spams. I think we caught about 95%, which still allowed 10 spams into my inbox in a single day.

Second, our effectiveness may go up and down slightly over time. In the last 12 months, or maybe even 6, many of the largest spammers have adopted a new strategy of using open proxies installed on residential customer computers by trojan horse or virus software. Frankly, this makes them harder to track. We're adapting to their strategies and have strategies of our own, but it's a difficult task.

JT

I had assumed that if some incoming spam was already 'held', then it didn't need to be 'reported' since it was already being caught by Spamcop. I've been dutifully reporting any spam that gets through to my inbox, though. After checking 'held mail' for false positives a few times and finding none, I've just been emptying it every few days.

Are you recommending that I should 'mark all' and 'report as Spam' everything in my held mail folder rather than just emtying it?

I was just about to post a [to me] very simple comment, when I came across this note from Brad Fuller.

Great! His question was what I wanted to ask, too!

And the answers - from Jeff G and Jeff T - were interesting.

As a newbie, I have no idea whether the volume of spam I am experiencing is "normal" or unusual. Brad gets 100 items of spam a day. So do I. Maybe I'm normal, then - even though no-one in my daily, non-electron world gets that many.

This weekend, SpamCop caught 270 spam emails for me, but 15 more unfortunately leaked through. I was upset, but having looked at this forum topic, I guess a 6% leakage is okay - heck, JT found 5% leaking through.

Like Scott Heath, originally I was deleting all held mail without reporting, but when I enquired about this process in a newsgroup, was persuaded to report all the held mail anyway.

Then I came across the feature of being a "mole" and enabled it - so now my 100+ daily spams are reported to SpamCop but not back to the spammer.

Would someone enlighten me as to why being a mole helps rid the world of spam?

Tony H-J

It helps anybody using the SpamCop Blacklist get rid of spam by pushing those IP's into the blacklist. That includes all of us and the many people who use mailservers protected by the SpamCop Blacklist.

JT

I've noticed the same. In my case all for online pharmacy stuff. I've posted an example in the spamcop.spam newsgroup.

Andrew

Hi all!

I'm relatively new to spamcop.net, but I've been using the service provided by tmicha.net in the past year or so. I've switched to spamcop.net because the tmicha.net mailserver unfortunately is down a lot which does get rid of spam, but also of any other incoming e-mail

I've also noticed an increase in the amount of spam messages that are getting through the filters. Also, in my case, the spam messages are about "great viagra, xanax and valium deals".

The people behind those spam messages seem to care a great deal about not getting filtered out, but by using characters like @, |, 0 (instead of O) they make their messages almost unreadable

Anyway, being the "good citizen" that I am, I've reported all those messages, and now I'm wondering if the "trick" these guys are using to fool the filtering systems (whatever this is) is going to be "tackled" soon. In other words: is there going to be a "fix" for the filters in the near future?

Regards,
Ron Buist

The Netherlands

Ron,

We're constantly working on the filters. I think you'll find that we're still blocking at least 90% of all spam. But these guys send out so many spams, that, while we're blocking most of them, some are still getting through.

JT