I've often wondered if my reports sometimes "confirm" an addy --
Given all the coded junk that's buried in forged headers & content, it's not hard to imagine the ease of planting a unique ID that's NOT so obvious.
No secret that lots of ISPs' primary income seems to be spam -or- spammers.
Hence, a report to a source just confirms that the junk got delivered, and I'm actually helping those jokers improve their methods. Argghhhh.

Anybody else feel that way, or is my tinfoil hat on too tight ??

Not only that, I have had an e-mail from one report complaining that the IP reported did not belong to them. Apparently they could not even recognize it in the report. Have the spammers figured out a way to mask even the origin of spam?

...Oh, I quite agree with you, as do others who frequent these fora as well as in the newsgroups, as I've seen this concern raised before.

Spamcop sometimes makes mistakes in where to send the reports. There is an entire newsgroup (spamcop.routing) devoted to this issue. You could also send an email off to the deputies with the complaint.

Did you then check manually to see if the IP address was indeed associated with that ISP?

Did you also recheck spamcop to see if that IP would get reported to the same address again or if the problem was resolved

Thanks Steve. Unfortunately the e-mail was in Romanian, the language of the offending spamsite!

I will see if I can make them answer in English.

Nothing I suggested you do requires them to answer you in English. The IP (if provided) is enough to see if it would go to the same ISP that sent you the "complaint".

frustrating for sure. SC now allows `mole mode' where no email reports are ever sent, but your reports still populate the bl.

I guess in the end SC will still be able to build a bl that will protect us from them, even if sometimes we tell them our email address is valid.

This information is no longer accurate per the FAQ: http://www.spamcop.net/fom-serve/cache/373.html