Hello all,

I'm a newbie to having a SpamCop e-mail account, although I've been reporting spam on SpamCop for years. I am an attorney who practices in the intellectual property area (no kidding), so I always include choice quotes from the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 in the "notes" section of my SpamCop reports. I have some pre-printed "warnings" saved as a Word file that I cut and paste into reports, so if anyone would like to receive them, please just let me know.

Anyway, as I was setting up my e-mail account, I noticed that SpamCop set-up instructions name two different POP servers: one is "mail.spamcop.net" and the other is "pop.spamcop.net." Which is the correct POP server? I am especially interested in this topic because I have not received a single piece of e-mail since my ISP started forwarding my mail to SpamCop over 24 hours ago.

Thanks for your help.

At the present time, they're actually the same. We'd prefer you use pop.spamcop.net, though, in case that changes in the future.

Can you login to webmail and see any email there? If not, either you have set up a mail loop (i.e. forwarding back to the same address that forwards to us) or your ISP really isn't forwarding.

JT

pop.spamcop.net is the correct, updated server to use for POP.
imap.spamcop.net is the correct, updated server to use for IMAP.
mail.spamcop.net used to be the recommended server name and may still be listed in some of the documentation.

All 3 are actually still the same machine, so for practical purposes, it should not matter right now, but JT (mail administrator) has stated that these may become separate machines in the future.

As far as not receiving any email, please contact JT (service<at>spamcop.net or JeffT on this board) and/or your ISP to look at the mail logs to see where the messages are going.

Hi JT,

Thanks for such a prompt response.

In answer to your question:

(1) Yes, I can login to webmail, and I can see the initial admin welcome message. I also got the registration message from this Board, and if I send an e-mail to my SpamCop address, it appears in my webmail account.

(2) I spent a great deal of time with one of my ISP's tech support people this morning (my ISP is mminternet, so I can actually call and talk to live people who are competent and they are able to check things out while I am on the phone with them), and it is clear my mail is being forwarded to my SpamCop e-mail address.

(3) I'm pretty sure I haven't set up a mail loop, because my mail is forwarded from mminternet to SpamCop, and then it's POPed back to Outlook Express from SpamCop's mail server (pop.spamcop.net).

(4) I set up this post to receive e-mail notification of replies, and I got an e-mail notification of your reply at my mminternet.com address.

I think maybe the problem is that SpamAssassin is set too high. Do most people leave it set at 5? There were at least two e-mails I *know* were sent to me within the last 24 hours, that I never received. They are not in my "held mail"; they are not anywhere.

Any other suggestions or advice or words of wisdom would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,

PChuck

So, to summarize: email sent directly to your spamcop.net account gets to you fine. Email forwarded by your ISP is never received and doesn't appear in your Held Mail, either.

Sorry, about 99.99% of the time, this is because the ISP really isn't forwarding email. Ask them to check their logs and show us log entries for messages they forwarded.

Here's our FAQ on the issue:
http://www.spamcop.net/fom-serve/cache/354.html

JT

But if I'm POPing back to a client on my local machine, and I only have one account with my ISP, does this create a loop?

Let's go back to the beginning. Your first post was a question as to the specific POP server. That would lead to an assumption that you're setting your Outlook Express to POP from SpamCop. No problem there.

You then say that conversation with mminternet folks results with the thoughts that e-mail coming to your account at mminternet are forwarded to your SpamCop address. Again, not a problem there.

However, then you state that e-mail is not found at your SpamCop address and query SpamAssisin thresholds. But then you state there there is some e-mail found there, though that sounds like a locally generated Welcome message, so not a real e-mail. Problem there is that the SpamCop server, although using the BL and whatever other filters you've selected don't "drop" e-mail. So there is definitely a question there.

Then you state that you checked and found e-mail at your mminternet account. This brings up a couple of quesitons. Why wasn't it forwarded to the SpamCop account. One answer might be timing, say mminternet does a mail run on the half-hour, and you hit that account before the Forwarding transfer occurred. But this doesn't help your "known two e-mails that never arrived", as this takes things back to mminternet says things are forwarded, but indications are that the SpamCop account never receives them.

To answer your question, you can only get a loop if you have bot accounts forwarding to each other. You've not said that you set SpamCop to Forward anything, so there should be no loop. On the other hand, there is a question as to why you are checking both accounts. If mminternet Forwards everything, then you'd only be checking the SpamCop account when firing up your e-mail app.
That you've indicated that you're still POP'ing both accounts raises a flag in my mind.

Based on all the above, would have to suggest that you go through the set-ups again to verify that things are wrking like you think they're working. As JT's remarks, if you can see at least a snippet of mminternet's logs, is the account being forwarded to actually going to the right account. That you're not seeing any e-mail, but not seeing any bounces in your ISP's account seems a bit odd ... wondering perhaps why "we" haven't seen someone else complaining of getting all these strange e-mails dumped into their account .... or worse, are they being reported as spam by that other user .. off the wall, but just a thought .. until you see the data from your ISP, it's a definite mystery at this point.

This problem appears to have been fixed in another Topic in this Forum, "Forwarding vs. POPing", with last post on 3rd February 2004 at 09:08 PM EST -0500 by PChuck.

Yes, I saw that only after going through all the typing in .... glad to see that one of my guesses was the actual issue, just not sure why a second thread/Topic was started about essentially the same issue is all ....

Thank you, Yazoo, for all your time and typing, and I am sorry I did not put a link to this topic when I posted that the problem was solved in the other thread.

Actually, when started, the two topics were totally different: one was about whether pop.spamcop.mail or mail.spamcop.mail was the correct mail server, and the other was on the difference between "re-forwarding" and POPing mail back to a client on my local machine. The responses provided by the good people of this Forum (and some of my subsequent posts in both topics) tended to lead both topics toward a similar conclusion.

Again, I am sincerely sorry for the time you lost thinking about this and typing in the Forum, and I really do appreciate all the help everyone (including you) has offered so readily. At least now you have the satisfaction of knowing you were right!