jas88

My new work email address fails initial attempts with "451 Requested action aborted: local error in processing." A well-timed retry got through OK, suggesting this is just a graylisting issue - could the mailhost configuration robot not provide at least the option to queue the configuration email for automatic retries? (As a workaround, I sent the address a test email of my own through Spamcop webmail just after getting this error; as soon as that arrived, I reloaded the mailhost configuration page with the error, forcing a retry at the appropriate time. It worked, but hardly ideal!) On a related note, the ability to mark certain IP addresses or netblocks as "friendly/trusted", rather than jump through robot configuration hoops, would be very useful and should be more effective at avoiding "friendly fire" reports long term too.

As a paying SC customer, it's a pain. The front-end we all connect to is hosted by Akamai (EdgeSuite), so the ability to ping or connect to that is meaningless: it just means your nearest Akamai edge node is live, which should always be the case whatever is happening to Spamcop. One way or another, this attack is taking out the back end servers that do the actual analysis and DNS lookups for spam reporting. My suspicion would be the DNS side of things, unless it's a pure brute force crapflood or an old load balancer in front of the servers - although with the current codebase, junk submissions with lots of slow-resolving hostnames in might be enough to hit concurrency limits or disk thrashing.

I'm sure the new webmail system is very nice, but since I'm unable to access it at all, I can neither comment on it nor report the problem through the link! (Hence this account being registered with my GMail address: I can still access that...) (Every time I log in, Firefox downloads a file named "webmail.php", after a long delay. Presumably a botched MIME type somewhere?)