Every one was identical and every one that I checked came from aplus.net, who I called while they were coming in at 1 per second, and who had an idiot night time tech support who said to email their abuse address, which spamcop had already done 500 times by then.

I think I've had a similar occurrence from aplus.net some time ago, though not quite as bad.

Does anyone know what is going on with this? Is is a spammer programming error or an attack against aplus.net, or me?

Also, how do I set reporting to be for more than 100 at a time? I still have 3300 emails to report and spamcop is getting ridiculously slow processing 100 reports at a time.

Then after reporting as many of these as I can, at 100 per time, get connection refused from spamcop, even thought I can access other areas on the menu.

Getting too late to play with this, but I would appreciate any insights.

Maybe someone doesn't like you? Appreciate an example tracking link so 'we' can see what confronts you. There is a limit to how much spam you can report per day - seems you might have hit it. Is there a limit on reporting spam?. Anticipate the "Your account has been disabled" message. That is purely routine, nothing personal.

I should have added that *if* these all track back to the same IP address there would be no point in reporting them all. But that's probably *not* the case - depending on the exact meaning of "Every one was identical", assuming for the moment you mean the body, not body + all headers (which would be relatively easy to get stopped). No, I'm thinking in terms of a distributed attack and you taking on a whole botnet (or a fair part of one) in your reporting. Sympathy, in any event.

I also had lots of the same spam sent to one of my webmail accounts. The number of spam emails received jumped from around 50 per day to 675 spam emails. I imagine it was done to strike back at the anti-spammers reporting bad websites on McAfee's SiteAdvisor. It took a long time before they closed the open relay at aplus.net.

Well it seems to be over for now. The tracking is

http://www.spamcop.net/sc?id=z2300703753zf...c65e1bf295e55az

for those interested.

Every one I checked at random was identical and had the same email source (aplus.net) and the same godaddy hosted website.

I think I received about 4500 of these, all held by spamcop, but they all came in over 12-24 hours, perhaps less. I contacted aplus.net (their legal department and a few others) and received the following reply (as well as a few inane ones from other departments):

This server has been shut down for the past 2 days. However the spammer
sent thousands of emails that were already in the outbound queue so
suspending the server did not stop that traffic until the queue was
emptied. We took action against this spammer within minutes of receiving
spam complaints. The spam should be stopped by now.

Somehow this explanation doesn't ring very true, and I had a similar but less severe incident with aplus.net in the past year. Perhaps simple incompetence is the reason.

However, the logic behind this is still puzzling and the only one that really makes sense to me is a programming error by the spammer.

Also, while it may make no difference to report 4500 identical spam, I like to think it makes a difference to the likes of aplus.net, who presumably will have that many more reports against them in a spam database somewhere, and some jerk somewhere in aplus.net will know how many reports he/she had to delete, and it gives me something to do while I'm waiting for some other page on something else to load.

In the past I have usually seen a notice that the issue has been taken care of and spamcop will not send more reports. That never happened here, from aplus.net, or godaddy.com.

Also, I noticed that spamcop can take up to 5 minutes to deal with 100 reports, before one can continue with the next 100. Is capacity really that limited?

Until the next time...

Apparently you've not looked at the graphic/link provided at the top right of this page ..??

The history of SpamCop.net includes the constructed capability of accepting spam submittals via e-mail .... primarily as a solution from those bitching about having to submit each spam individually using the web-form. This e-mail submittal mode was configured in as a "background" process, the general scenario was that one would fire up the computer at the start of the day, select and submit that spam, go back to (real) work, with the actual review and sending of complaints happening as the parse results accumulated.

Under this scenario, everything is still working fine after all these years, system upgrades and moves, etc. However, folks that came on-board later have become accustomed to "immediate" results, getting excited when things take some time. Once again, I suggest taking a look at the Reporting System Status graphic/link, note that your e-mailed 100 spams are sitting in a queue, waiting for some 'free' cpu/network time to slide into the parsing process, (noting that quite a chunk of system resources has to be set aside just to store the collected results of those already parsed from your submittal) .. then eventually get around to generating the notification that all processing has been completed on your submittal .... all the while, handling other submittals from folks around the world, some of them asking the same question you've posed here.

That would not be the reason that I got 43 of them. They were however sent to my most spammed email address which equates to the address that most of my SpamCop and KnujOn reports relate to.