For weeks now, every report of more than about 6 held mails will result in a gateway timeout error. When reporting a bunch of mails, I will get the timeout but some of the mails get reported anyway.
Apart from the reporting being VERY slow, this is getting to be more of a hastle than it's worth.

I have seen a few of these as well. I have yet to notice how many email I have reported when this happens. I do know I have to navigate back to my held mail and sometimes all have been reported and sometimes all but one or two have made it through.

I usually report two to three times a day when I can, hopefully enough to keep my numbers down per batch.

Same here. I have stopped reporting from the Held Mail page because it takes too long. Shoot, it takes too long to even delete the messages so I may start ignoring that, too. It's all I can do to scan the recent held messages for false negatives--very few which is good. Not the most functional system, though.

Have any of you tried reporting from the webmail application? I find it very easy with none of the timeouts you are mentioning.

Also, it has been mentioned before that if you have too many messages in your trash folder, it will realy slow down the whole account.

Hope this helps

Didn't know about the trash tip. I checked and as of tonight I had 396 in my trash. I try and empty trash every time I am in the webmail, but that is maybe once a week.

See, I have it set to retrieve from account A, filter, send to account B. So I only check my held folder a few times a day and never make it to the webmail interface.

Maybe we can get an empty trash link on the held mail page, for people who have email accounts?? Just a thought.

I doubt that will happen as JT has stated that all development is being done on reporting from within webmail and that VER would be going away eventually. How long that is, could be anybody's guess.

Webmail isn't really a good solution. I don't really have the time or inclination to log into webmail and navigate the screens there. Reporting needs to be quick and simple, or it isn't worth the trouble. The end result of these problems will be that I don't do anything at all and just let the spam accumulate.

If Spamcop expects people to pay for service, then actually providing service would be a good step.

Personally, I find it much quicker than VER.

I have webmail setup to enter my Held Mail folder on login. I then hit the box to checkmark all messages. I scan down making sure they all need to be reported, unchecking those that do not. When I get to the bottom, I hit the Report as Spam button and accept. DONE.

I can forward and whitelist any messages that are there incorrectly.

I do it a little differently. I scan through my Held Mail Folder in Webmail, immediately processing any that aren't spam. When I hit the bottom, I hold Alt, tap K to "Mark All", tap E to highlight "Report as Spam", release Alt, tap Enter to activate "Report as Spam", and tap Enter again to confirm my intent.

Alt-key does not work on either the Mac or Treo keypads. The webmail system seems quite powerful with lots of options but I'm not really comfortable with its appearance and complexity, that I have to leave my email client to access it, and its clumsiness on a small PDA screen. I appreciate that you are trying to please the majority of users who do not use the Mac or Palm OS. However, a more universal approach would be better IMO.

Palm has been mentioned as a problem in the past but I have not heard many complaints from Mac users.

Thanks for the suggestions, but I still don't consider the process of logging into webmail to be an acceptable solution. Guess I'm too lazy.

BTW, I used the webmail to report 55 spams today, and received 55 error messages that SPamcop could not find any spam in the message. DUH!

Got one this moring, around GMT 00:20

Had less than 10 in held mail.

Gateway Timeout
The proxy server did not receive a timely response from the upstream server

But when I returned to held mail, they were all gone, reported.

I get it all the time, mostly with >10 reports. Also get lots of error messages if I report from the webmail.

Still occurring every day, sometimes 2-3 times in a row. This morning, 4 timeouts in a row, trying to report about 20 spams, with no more than 5 spams getting reported in each session.

As long as your email client is not currently doing anything that would disrupt Webmail (like removing emails within your Held Mail Folder) while you are reporting spam from your Held Mail Folder within your Webmail, you should be able to interoperate between email and Webmail. I interoperate between them on my PC often.

Also, I am typically reporting up to 180 spam emails at a time from my Held Mail Folder using Webmail's "Report as Spam" Link.

The point was that I prefer to use an email client for what it does best--email--and a web browser for what it does. I dislike having to jump back-and-forth between both to handle the email. And I really dislike using webmail.

I tried to report a few hundred spams from the Webmail Held Mail folder and it took over 15 minutes with the slow log on, mail display, reporting, error message, refresh, and repeat a couple of times. And that's with a cable modem. Too much trouble! On the road with a low-speed wireless connection, the Webmail system barely works.

SpamCop looks like a reasonable system for people who want to use it exclusively for modest amounts of mail. For those of us who rely on an email client, spam reporting is inconvenient. Thankfully, SpamCop's default filters produce few false negatives so I do not need to check the Held Mail regularly.

Please be more specific about these.

As I mentioned in Selecting and deleting multple held emails, you can "Adjust "Messages per page in the mailbox view" in Webmail's Options / Other Options / Display Options to 1000." 1000 is the maximum.

I regularly (several times a year) use webmail to report the 100-150 messages I get every day using 24K dialup with no problems like you are describing.

Just wanted to point out that this thread was never about webmail. Webmail is not an option as far as I'm concerned, I will stop using Spamcop before I use webmail. (it's the log-on that I detest) As it is, I'm close to stopping any reporting of any kind, it's just not worth the trouble. I can get webmail and similar filtering services from my ISP, don't need to pay for that here.

I have repeatedly gotten two types of errors, one having to do with message numbers not being recognized and the other with timeouts.

And, yes, I increased the message display count (to 300 I think) and that was marginally better. Webmail is simply not a very sanitary way to handle that volume of mail.

In my case it takes several minutes for the mail listing to load. The spam reporting usually times out and requires a refresh. I don't have these kinds of problems with other sites.

4 consecutive timeouts this morning, trying to report about 30 mails. What a completely useless service.

I realize that at Spamcop, customer service is at the borrom of the list of priorities. Your attitude seems to be that customers are not worth bothering with, and NO PROBLEMS ever exist with your service.

Considering that filtering service can be had just about anywhere now days, I see little reason to give Spamcop any money when nothing else but filtering actually works.

I tried a more robust test. It was suggested I set the WebMail window to 1000 messages (actually, 999 is the upper limit) as I have around 2500 spam in Held Mail. Took about 130 seconds to load--not too bad. However, selecting "all" took something over 7 minutes; I'm not sure exactly how long because I walked away at that point and came back in 10 minutes at which time it was done. I was unsuccessful in 3 attempts to report the spam, each time getting the message: Could not open the page “http://webmail.spamcop.net/horde/imp/mailbox.php” after trying for 60 seconds. Big waste of time.

I notice this on the main SpamCop page:

System slow - update
Several factors are contributing to system slowness in the mornings. Some of the performance problems are still somewhat of a mystery. But we are aware of the issues and we will be working on them until we're satisfied they are under control (or at least explained). Of course we are always looking out for attacks on the service, but our initial investigation does not point in this direction.

So they are at least award of a problem. No solution in sight, though.

I don't know where you get that idea. Have you seen the reporting page recently?

Help improve SpamCop
System slow - update
Small Mailhost Beta

1 item to find out how you feel about the service
1 item telling you about a known problem they areworking on
1 item to imrove reporting and something that many people have been asking for since I signed up 15 months ago.

I will admit that they are not very responsive to requests for improvement but they do hear the requests. They have a lot on their plates keeping the service running and probably should have a larger staff to deal with these things.

Now onto your problem:


How (exactly) are you trying to report your spam. Which web site you using (there are several different methods). Are you using VER (http://mailsc.spamcop.net/reportheld?action=heldlog), webmail (http://webmail.spamcop.net/), or copy/paste submission (http://mailsc.spamcop.net/ or http://www.spamcop.net/)

I personally have reported about 100 messages this morning (sance 8:30 AM EST) through webmail (Report as spam) and experienced no timeouts. I have also submitted 1 message via email that slipped through the filter which has not come back yet, but as seen here (http://alpha.cesmail.net/graphics/spamstats.gif) we are in the middle of that slow period happening each morning described on the submitting page. I expect that submission to arrive around noon time.

one of those things that always should have been, but ... expertise in the subject matter, agreement in philosophies, and not even bringing up the programming knowledge needed - both to figure out what's in place and how to go from there, etc. <g> Recall that this was basically an experiment started at the kitchen table, opened up and offerd to others as a 'cool tool' way back when, and it's just gotten huge ever since <g> I've no doubt that had Julian had the vision that his little "tool" would have grown to the proportions it's at these days, there'd have been a number of things done just a bit different <g>


This may have nothing to do with anything or pehaps yet another clue ... but yesterday, I had two Gateway Timeouts when trying to post replies right here in these Forums. Absolutely nothing to do with e-mail what so ever. (well, other than being hosted on JT's system, I should say <g>)

The gateway timeouts occur for me when at http://www.spamcop.net/reportheld?action=heldlog

This usually occurs when the system is under a load and I report more than 6 or 7 held mail at a time. I usually "check all" and quick report, but when I have more than 7 or so, I just select 6 or and 7 and then quick report.

If I do get the gateway timeout, I go back to held mail, at http://www.spamcop.net/reportheld?action=heldlog and sometimes all were reported and sometimes there are a few left, not reported yet.

From my understanding that "page" is located on the west coast servers while the mail messages it is working on are located on the east coast servers. Many things can cause problems in that type of setup, most of which spamcop has no control over.

This is one of the reasons I encourage the use of webmail, which is also located on the east coast servers. As long as you keep your trash messages relatively clean (I keep 2 days which is 500+ messages) I find it quite responsive and simple to report the held mail. I also scan my inbox for false negatives (spam that slipped through the filters) and report/delete it before POPping the good messages to my desktop.

I got 3 consecutive timeouts today in WebMail trying to report spam. Adding insult to the wasted time, SpamCop barraged me with hundreds of messages notifying me that for each submission:

SpamCop encountered errors while saving spam for processing:
SpamCop could not find your spam message in this email: ...

I don't like WebMail to begin with and these kind of antics are not helping.

What do these timeouts say exactly. I have never had one and would like to try and help you (and the others) who are experiencing this situation.

Are they the same "gateway timeout" errors that people have reported from the VER page which appear to come from the spamcop application?
Is it a IE type error saying it could not find the host?

What is the exact text of the error? WHat URL are they coming from?



I receive these once every few days, but never with a timeout error. I know I am going to get them when I hit the Report as spam button and the same messages show up still in the mailbox. I simply select all and report again. I have a filter that I run to remove all of the spamcop quick report confirmations after I have checked them and these go to the bitbucket with the rest.

Again, no idea if what I saw a few days back has anything to do with the Topic complaint, but since no one else is offering ... what I recollect is a pretty large font Gateway timeout .. then a couple of paragragh / notes about network errors, see if you're still connected, contact the ISP ... generic stuff, though I still haven't actually determined yet whether this is another one of thse internally generated Windows screens (I'm thinking it is, especially based on the suggestion that there is no connection between 'here' and 'there')

Google'ing for Gateway Timeout issues of course shows that it happens all over the place, even seing the $100 USD a year .mac thing that Apple hosts was down for quite a while recently, and this was the error their users were seeing. Other technical papers get into proxies, dropouts of the ACK and SYNC handshakes, all the usual stuff. Not being privy to the internals of the SpamCop network, no idea on whether any of these things are applicable ..

But, in general, it appears that in most cases it boils down to network traffic in general ... not sure if a few trace-routes would show anything or not, but those results might show something, especially for these few that seem to have a constant issue..??

The message from Safari on a cable modem is:

Could not open the page “http://webmail.spamcop.net/horde/imp/mailbox.php” after trying for 60 seconds.

This indicates that the webmail server is not responding in a timely manner. In general, the problem can be caused by many things in the internet and at both ends, but in my case I'm on the web a couple of hours a day and rarely get this message from other severs. It happens consistently with SpamCop's WebMail when reporting large amounts of spam. The reasonable conclusion is that webmail system is not up to the task and should be fixed. Until that time I am simply not going to report much spam.

Overall slowness of spam reporting is another problem but may be related. Just getting to the point where I click the Report Spam button (log on, display message headers, select messages) can take 5 minutes or more, and then must be repeated several times to clear all the spam.

I have followed a few suggestions with no improvement. I wish I had time to tinker with all the settings and find the magic combination. Since it is a pay service, it seems reasonable to expect it to work without too much effort. So, I will just use it for the pre-filtering--which it does well--and let it go at that.

I felt the same, reporting is WAY more trouble than it's worth. I bypassed my SPamcop filter a few days ago and switched on the spam filter that Comcast offers me. Much to my surprise, the Comcast filter is more or less just as effective as Spamcop with all blacklists and S.A enabled. So now I'm wondering whether it makes any sense to pay for Spamcop at all, even for the filtering.

The responses here just serve to reinforce what I said about customer service at Spamcop. One is expected to PROVE that there is a problem with the system, and one is ignored until one does prove it. The fact that multiple people report problems seems to bear no weight.

Reporting has always been laborious and painfully slow, nothing has changed.

Fr starters, I don't even use that side of the house, and for as much typing as I've been doing, I'm a bit baffled by the "ignored" comment.

I haven't aksed for "proof" of anything. As an outside observer, wearing the systems analyst hat, I've been trying to correlate the data provided by some folks that say it works against some folks saying it's broke. There has to be something that hasn't been defined yet to address the differences.

And, sure I'll agree with your "multiple people" remark, but also point to what I just stated ... some have issues, others don't .. and there's "multiples" of both sides of that fence. Now, when I look through these Forums and peruse the newsgroups, the folks with the severe complaints that you and cats are describing don't have the "thousands" of others with the same issues. So, I'm just going with that for some reason, "you" are special, but what makes "you" special hasn't been pinned down yet.


Strange that those folks would be so efficient at blocking the incoming, yet ignore the issues of all their outgoing.


Definitely your call. It's your money. The filtered e-mail thing was set-up as an option for folks that don't have ISPs that are so "caring" for their customers. I'll state again, I'm not a user of this service, just someone trying to help others out.

And while Wazoo has been trying to correlate the data, I have been trying to see what I can do to try and cause the problems on my side. If I can get the problem to occur, I may be able to offer a work around and point JT in a direction for a permanent fix or general guidelines for limits to reporting.

I do not know the exact method the "Report as spam" uses, but email submission has limits on the size of the submission. The same may be occuring here. If we can get that defined, it would be better for all.

I currently use webmail with 10 messages per page. I find I am less likely to miss a valid message if all the messages fit on the screen without having to scan it. That being said, I will raise my screen view to a larger number, but I need to know what that number should be. I just set my webmail to display 100 messages per screen and I will see if it will error tomorrow morning (if I can remember not to report before then).

This is not about webmail reporting, never has been.

Perhaps not directly, but webmail keeps being suggested as part of the issue problem / solution / scenario .. in the description of the cross-country split between the various systems involved in the SpamCop "system"

And cats problem specifically is the webmail system.

For completeness, my test this morning with 157 held messages, I was able to report 100 at a time without a timeout. It did take longer than my normal time with only 10 being reported (maybe 15 seconds) so I could see with the setting set higher it might timeout before returning the screen, especially with a slower connection in the first place (I was at work with a T1 connection, home is 1 Mb cable). I would assume (but only JT can confirm) that the process would continue even with the browser timeout, similar to the Trash cleanup process. This would also make sence in the instances where people mention they log back in and the messages are gone (though not every case does that seem to happen).

From cats:
[QUOTE]This indicates that the webmail server is not responding in a timely manner. In general, the problem can be caused by many things in the internet and at both ends, but in my case I'm on the web a couple of hours a day and rarely get this message from other severs.[QUOTE]

I have not been saying that the problem is with your computer (or I have not been trying to), but I believe it is fixable within the webmail account configuration or internal to spamcop, specifically if you are doing large transactions. The webmail webserver will not respond (resulting in browser timeouts) until the background processes are complete (as is the case when emptying the trash at login).

If people are having problems when reporting via webmail with only a few messages at a time, we will need more information or you will need to work with
JT on the solution.

Just some links, definitions, and descriptions of various things, ways, and means that can cause a (Gateway) timeout error ... if you take just a bit of the time it took me to make this collection, you'll note that there are conditions in the Operating System (configurations), various applications / modules, and that's not counting the number of times "general internet traffic" came up ....
I tried to list them in an order of possibilities (?) .. but, I'm going to admit, I'm pretty tird right now ...

http://www.faqts.com/knowledge_base/view.phtml/aid/230
http://www.checkupdown.com/status/E408.html
http://www.checkupdown.com/status/E504.html
http://www.helpwithpcs.com/courses/html/ht...tatus_codes.htm
504 Gateway Timeout
The upstream server failed to send a request in the time allowed by the server.

http://www.sns.ias.edu/~jns/security/iptab..._conntrack.html
http://www.timo-tasi.org/python/timeoutsocket.py
http://www.fastcgi.com/mod_fastcgi/docs/mod_fastcgi.html
http://www.murraymoffatt.com/software-problem-0002.html
http://mail.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/098041.html
http://www.javacoffeebreak.com/articles/network_timeouts
http://www.javaworld.com/jw-09-1999/jw-09-timeout.html

http://www.nogoop.com/product_16.html
idle connection timeout - Most servers timeout connections after a certain interval. When HTTP clients use connection pooling, the fact that the connection was closed is detected when the next request is written to the connection. If it's an idempotent request (like a GET, or PUT) then it can just be retried on a new connection. However, POST cannot be retried (we don't know if it has been processed by the server or not), so the user of the HTTP client will get an error on this POST. The nogoop implementation provides a facility to terminate connections which have been idle for a (configurable) length of time, or alternatively to send a "ping" message before using a connection (if it has been idle for a certain amount of time). This ensures that POST requests will not be affected by the server connection timeout processing.

connection request timeout - A good timeout mechanism has three parts: timeout when establishing the initial connection, setting the TCP timeout on the connection (so that each request is subject to the timeout), and, if connection pooling is used, timeout while waiting for a connection to be available from the pool. The nogoop implementation is the only implementation that supports all of these.

and for the more adventursome, this may or may not change the symptoms and experiences along the Gateway Timeout issue. Microsoft Windos, IE 5 and 6 are the "targets" of this KnowledgeBase detail. Maybe it'll help?

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?...7&Product=ie600

Catch is, if the "multiple servers" in "multiple locations" are involved, then playing ith the values on "your" system may not do a thing .. but, aditional data I didn't have yesterday ...

... and my employer's e-mail system is exactly the opposite -- it gleefully delivers all kinds of viagra, penis, sexy, and ejaculation spam to me but won't let me send out LARTs unless I munge the "offensive" words! SpamCop is a godsend!