garyorman

With respect, Wazoo, I as a regular user sending out email to my colleagues and clients should not have to plow through pages of technical data in order to resolve this issue. I did not threaten legal action; I merely expressed my annoyance that I am having to go through all this in order to communicate - quite legitimately - with people who are personally known to me. I believe, however, that the candidate who has flown unncessarily from Cape Town to Johannesburg as a result of missing my email *may* have a legal case against spamcop, and my sympathies would be with him. I am certainly puzzled by your assertion that spamcop does not 'block' email. I thought that was the primary purpose of spamcop. If this is not the case then I seriously misunderstand the intentions of this organization and I apologize. Why do the emails come back to me stating that my mailserver is on the SpamCop black list? Who is legally responsible, then, for blocking my mail and what recourse do I have to remedy the situation. The FAQ and other pages that I keep going round and round to aren't clear to me. Perhaps because I am not much of an expert in mail technology. Most people would not have made it 'this far' as you suggest. This is a serious enough issue for me to try to get to the bottom of as our company is dealing with several hundred potential candidates from South Africa who have responded to our ads in the Sunday Times. It is not fair to them if our emails don't get through. I have another hat as a UK registered journalist, and I also smell a good story here. I know it's something that the Sunday Times would be very interested in covering. Journals liked Wired or The Economist might also want to run a feature on how the anti-spam movement can cause more harm than good. Trying to work through your statistics, are you saying that a mere 3 'reportings' over a couple of days is enough to blacklist a mailserver? Surely that is overzealousless gone mad!? Nevertheless, I am concerned if there is any hint of spam originating from me in some way and would like to resolve the matter. I rent a virtual server with Kionic.com in the USA. When I ping my website I get 206.123.101.28, so I don't know how 206.123.101.27 is mixed up in this business. Of course there are going to be thousands of users with similar addresses - it's a virtual server after all. Were you able to find any instances of my IP 206.123.101.28 actually being reported for spam? If so, I'd be interested in finding out how this could happen and how to rectify it. If, as one suggestion in the FAQ pointed out, it's a virus then it's a serious matter that has to be dealt with. Maybe everybody's mail on the Kionic servers go through this (.27) mailserver...? I'm also a little puzzled as to the 'average' reporting statistic. Are you saying there are 3 reports on average every day regarding spam specifically? In my humble opinion, 3 isn't a lot. Surely it would be better to block serious spammers with 1,000s of reports, not a mere 3??? I don't really understand the rest of the reported data. I discovered that kcquest is also kionic, so I will try to speak to my hosting provider as well. I did try contacting hostspectrum.com, but their home page simply states it's antispam policy and emails to their postmaster bounces back. Yes, I am ignorant about this issue. It is extremely condescending of you to slag me off about that because many many others wouldn't have even got this far. I am grateful, however, for your comprehensive reply and perhaps you can suggest how it is that spamcop blocks email yet doesn't. Surely if my (our) mailserver is on your blacklist then it gets blocked? Isn't that the purpose of the list??? Are you saying that I must somehow try to negotiate with Kionic, telkomsa and absamail if I want to send email to their respective customers? The point is that it shouldn't be up to regular innocent users sending legitimate emails to have to go round the houses, contacting various ISPs to have this issue dealt with. Frankly, I prefer to deal with spam myself rather than have Nanny do it for me. Thank you for you efforts in dealing with this matter. Gary Orman (my real name)

I am extremely upset and annoyed with this spamcop nonesense. I am based in Thailand and my colleague is currently in South Africa, recruiting staff for our business in Asia. All our communication with candidates and new employees are by email and recently I have discovered that some people cannot receive email because the mail server is being blocked by spamcop. I hate spam as much as the next man, but this overzealous 'solution' has gone too far. I wrote to one candidate urgently to stop him flying from Cape Town to Johannesburg for the interview, but he didn't get his email. When I discovered this, I tried to call him on his cell phone but he was already boarding and I won't be able to reach him until it's too late. I'm wondering whether he will have a legal case against spamcop? The spamcop website is horrendously confusing, obviously designed by technical people. Most of the people who use email are regular people who have no idea what a 'mail server' is or even and 'IP address'. --------------------------------------------------------------- Here is the returned message I received (edited to protect identities) A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed: xxxx[at]telkomsa.net SMTP error from remote mail server after MAIL FROM:<consultant[at]fcinasia.com> SIZE=5623: host mail.telkomsa.net [196.25.211.150]: 553 sorry, your mailserver [206.123.101.27] is rejected by See http://www.spamcop.net/bl.shtml xxxx[at]absamail.co.za SMTP error from remote mail server after initial connection: host smtpserv.absamail.co.za [196.35.40.11]: 553 Your IP address 206.123.101.27 is blackholed by bl.spamcop.net. ------ This is a copy of the message, including all the headers. ------ Dear XXXX, William has contracted pneumonia over the weekend and is in hospital. Which of course means that there will be no interviews on Monday. I am terribly sorry for the inconvenience. Please do not come to your appointment. Your meeting has been postponed to Wednesday 13th, same time same place. Hopefully William will have recovered sufficiently by then to be able to meet you. Please contact me urgently if this is not convenient for you and I will try to find a time for you. Many thanks in advance for your understanding. Kind regards, Gary Orman consultant[at]fcinasia.com ----------------------------------------------------- 1. Please, as a matter of urgency, can someone help me to unblock the mail server (my IP address is 206.123.101.28 by the way, not 206.123.101.27 - so spamcop must be a severe anti-mail system indeed!) 2. What can be done to prevent spamcop from so aggressively blocking legitimate mail? I would suggest either to give mail the benefit of the doubt unless there has been a considerable number of complaints (over 1,000 say) against the mail sender - and not necessarily the mail server, which might be shared by many virtual accounts. Alternatively, a direct phone service where you can contact a support representative to unblock the mail server manually, and place your server on a white list. Another suggestion might be for blocked emails to be routed via a spamcop mail server so that the technicians can verify the emails for themselves and see that they are not spam. I would prefer that spamcop be switched off completely. It's probably not going to happen though. I still get spam and I deal with it by placing spam (fairly aggressively) into a spam folder, keeping my white list updated, and scanning spam mail at the end of each day for legitimate messages. Unfortunately, spamcop doesn't even give the recipient the choice whether to accept or reject messages or not. That's what makes spamcop in some ways worse than the spammers. I'm sure the spammers hate spamcop, but I - as a legitimate email user - am beginning to hate spamcop even more, and I am now loath to use any kind of service that is in any way similar to spamcop. It annoys and inconveniences people and can seriously affect business and livelihoods.