Hello,

I've got an quite unusual problem. First of all I have to describe my situation. We have a company which develops several Sharewareprograms. One of them is called "MailOUT" and is a program to send out Newsletters to customers. In the unregistred shareware version (which everyone can download) a sentence is added to every mail with a shareware notice, in this notice is also the URL of our website. Last week I've got a complaint from our provider 1&1 (einsundeins.de) that several people claimed at their abuse department, that they got spam from us, reported thru Spamcop.

We figured out, that the havn't got spam from us, but spam sended with the unregistred version of our program and because the only domain in the mail which can be addressed directly to someone was our URL in the shareware notice. So people claimed US for sending spam.

My question is now, is there way for Spamcop to regconize that OUR domain is not used for spam, because the only fact that our url is in a e-mail?

Please believe we have really done everything in our software to prohibit that people send spam, but due to the nature of a E-Mail-Software, it CAN be used for stuff like this, and we can't influence what people do with our software, also due to the fact that those people don't use registred versions of the program, so we even don't know who's the sender.

Greetings!

You may want to take sometime to read up what SpamCop reporting does...

In summary:

1. The primary purpose is to identify the source IP addresses of spam Email. Spam runs from an IP cause the address to be added to the SpamCop Block List and this is used by many ISPs to drop Email from probable spam sources.

2. A secondary use is the identification of what are sometimes called spamvertised URLs. These are reports concerning URLs which appear inside a message. These reports do not have any effect other than to generate a warning to the owner of the URL that their domain is being distributed in this manner. The report does not cause a listing in the SCBL.

From your description you seem to have situation 2.

You have several options:

1. Remove your URL from the shareware message
2. Work with your ISP and the SpamCop deputies and have the deputies stop sending the warning messages.
3. Educate your ISP to understand the difference between a listing report (1) and the advisory regarding a URL (2)

I'd recommend all three.

A fourth option might be to rethink your distribution model for this software. A shareware product for mass-Email distribution is highly likely to be abused by spammers unless significant inconvenience to bulk Emailers can be incorporated.

Andrew

I lookup up several of your domains in the database of SpamCop "complaints" (spam reports) and didn't find any of them. I lookup up the full URL for your "MailOut" programs (the URL that ends with "newsletter-software.shtml") as well as the home page of your company (IN Media KG) and also your other site (acx-software.com), but I couldn't find any actual spam complaints for any of the URLs that I looked up. Perhaps you could give us the URL that appears in the email messages from the unregistered version so that we could look it up?

DT

Thanks for your fast response, not usual on rbl's.

@davidT: Yes you're right, our ISP seems having recieved only an warning and just don't know how to interpretet it right. Currently the mentioned domain in the sharewarenotice is the www.in-mediakg.de. There is no actual complaint, so everthing's fine there for the moment.

@agsteele: Well the shareware notice with the url in there, is a quite good thing to get new customers under normal circumstances, if we don't think about abusement. But it's quite clear that spamers a) don't buy software and normally use other software, because in the unregistred version, he is only able to send out 50 mails.

Due to this issue, we have not build in there a 30 days time period or something like this, to prevent spamers to use our program, also a lot of notices in program inform the user what he is allowed to, and what not.

I've talked to our ISP and got things right , to notice the difference between those two reporting forms. But as I know our ISP (it's the largest in germany) I'm sure that information isn't spread to everyone it concerns or totally different people work there to the next incident. So I guess this will happen again. Really problem for us, because ISP gave us 48 hours to say something to the incident, otherwise our account would be suspended. So maybe a white-lisitng via spamcop would be great, if possible.

Not so much a white-listing as not having reports sent. But you will need to either get yourself listed to receive all these reports or get your ISP to request not to be notified about reports for spamvertised URLs.

Andrew