I have had a spamcop e-mail account for years. Recently I started getting a sedo newsletter which gets flagged as spam. When I try to release it, nothing happens. It stays in the 'Held Mail' folder. The first time it happened I figured it was a fluke but now a month later I have gotten another sedo newsletter and it is doing the same thing. I think there is something strange about the message that causes the release or release and whitelist functions to quietly fail. I still have the e-mail in my 'Held Mail' folder if an admin wants to look at it.

No one 'here' has access to your e-mail account (data) unless you'd want to send that via PM.

A very recent newsgroup thread (that drifted back tothe newsgroup versus Forum again with the 'official' FAQ being an/the issue ...geeze) .... anyway, there was an issue brought up that ended up with one person describing a "missing" Message-ID: header line, another describing a 'broken' Message-ID: header line.

That problem was described as "getting an error when trying to Previes the e-mail in the Held folder ..."

The error is not the same as you describe, but ... is the "problem" the same?

Thanks for the reply Wazoo. I understand that nobody here has access to my account, but I don't know where to turn. It isn't overly obvious who I would turn to for support -- not so much that I am asking for support, I am just offering to help find a bug.

I'll take a look at that other thread. Thanks again!

Though he does seem to use the word "we" a lot, to my knowledge, there is only JT to run, maintain, and admin the e-mail servers. In the past, other users have sent me their account details, so I could get into their accounts, take a look. I used one of those opportunities to write up a couple of FAQ entries. Those user details are deleted from my system and memory when that word is accomplished.

On the other hand, I am not a SpamCop.net employee, just a volunteer ...

The "other thread" can be found at;

Newsgroups: spamcop.mail news://news.spamcop.net/spamcop.mail
Subject: Error trying to preview held mail
Date: Sun, 27 Aug 2006 13:36:15 -0700

Also, have tou tried the Webmail Beta to see if the problem exists there as well? It could help indicate whether this is a program or datat problem (same data is accessed from both programs).

http://forum.spamcop.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=6849

This can happen with two specific factors:

1. You have your account set to forward "good" mail to another external address.
2. The email in question has some problem with its headers. You may not notice it, but there is probably some subtle illegal thing in the headers.

What happens is that to release the email, our system has to email it to you (because of #1). But our system won't accept email which has a lot of different header problems. So, when we try to email it to you, it fails (because of #2). The system is set up to try to be very careful and safe with your email. When the forward fails, it leaves it in your Held Mail instead of deleting it.

I realize there's not much feedback to figure out why it isn't getting released. If you can whitelist this particular newsletter, it will get through without ever being held in the first place. Look at the "Return-path" header. That's usually the best place to whitelist newsletters. Just enter the domain (everything to the right of the @) in your personal whitelist unless it's something really common which might accidentally whitelist a bunch of spam.

JT