I've had a problem recently with trying to report via email. Some of my email messages will go through and be reportable, other forwarded messages seem to vanish without a trace. I know I've got the correct reporting email address as some of the messages go through. But there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason for the missing emails. Anyone able to offer any sort of explanation why this would be? It's frustrating to try to report and have the emails just disappear.

We have seen this when ISP's are scanning the outgoing messages and dropping anything registering as spam. Unfortunately getting them to admit it is usually no easy task as that information is usually not given to L1 and sometimes even L2 techs.

I have not lost any messages, but I have very controlled environment... SpamCop email for home and the mail server I administer at work.

SpamCop FAQ links at the top of this page

under the SpamCop Parsing and Reporting Service section

E-mail Submittal Problems / Issues
E-Mail spam submittals blocked by your ISP? Updated!
Emailed spam Submissions Disappearing? No Confirmation e-mails?

It sure seems like you're asking the same question here. Have you taken a look at any of this pre-existing data?

Steven, I might agree with this if *all* outgoing spam destined for SpamCop was blocked, but only a fraction of the messages I report get "lost."

After reading the FAQ, I think I might try using Sendmail (since it's already running on my box) to send emails to SpamCop for reporting. Worth a shot at least...

I just got to thinking... I wonder if my ISP has some sort of "rate limiting" software in place so I can't send more than a small handful of messages to the same recipient in a short period of time? That might explain part of it.... Of course, getting them to admit to that is unlikely to happen!

My experience with a madly filtering ISP - stuff comes in (Lord alone knows how much inwards is blocked - a huge amount I suspect) but he blocks SOME of the stuff he let in when I forward it out. Always blocks viruses outwards. Submitting multiple spam in the one 'forward as attachment' seems to shoehorn more through than singly, especially if the 'top' one is 'sizeable', bigger than the typical spam. Consequently I keep one such (perfectly innocuous) piece of mail in each of my mail boxes for that purpose. From my work machine I have an internal message with no headers - parser totally ignores it. From home I just use an old message - parser says "too old" goes on to the next one. Submission from work is just about 100% successful (provided no viruses). From home (same ISP but evidently different handling for person account) is is maybe 70% successful providing the spam is fresh - seems to be some heuristics involved in the filter.

YMMV

Hmm... thanks for the tips. I'll see if some of those tricks work. Unfortunately, it appears Sendmail won't send, and I will have to tweak the sending address to use an alternate mail provider (HotPop, Yahoo, GMail, etc) as it looks like they all require something specific to them....

Well, on Friday, I got home and found my ISP was having issues. I think that might have had something to do with the problem. I also started using my HotPop SMTP account to send emails and that seems to be working.