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NetworkWorld article blasts Spamcop


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SpamCop disrupts millions of e-mail accounts by blocking Yahoo e-mail servers

Businesses using Yahoo cloud e-mail are up in arms with little recourse to make SpamCop change its blacklist policy on Yahoo mail.

By Larry Chaffin on Wed, 06/01/11 - 11:43am.

SpamCop has decided to block all e-mail coming from Yahoo servers, even if the e-mail is legit and part of Yahoo's business cloud services. On Monday I was replying to a email from a customer and a vendor, when I received the message below.

Remote host said: 554 5.7.1 Service unavailable; Client host [98.138.91.154] blocked using bl.spamcop.net; Blocked - see http://www.spamcop.net/bl.shtml?98.138.91.154 [RCPT_TO]

At first I thought it was the customer and the vendor, but they told me that they do not use this service. I then called Yahoo who told me on the phone that SpamCop is blocking all Yahoo email server by IP address. There is nothing they can do and sometimes it will time out after a day. This was not good enough for me so I did some more digging and called some friends, it seems that many service providers or ISPs are using SpamCop. The end customer has no idea that they are using it and also no idea that email is getting blocked. More.

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I just had to add a comment.

You don't understand blocklists

By SpamCop 98 (not verified) on Thu, 06/02/2011 - 12:29pm.

For a guy who has a column in a major tech pub, your sure know precious little about how blocklists work.

SpamCop blocks nothing, it only makes a list available to ISPs of IP #s that are known to be spamming. Perhaps you would be well served to read the wikipedia entry on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNSBL before writing about such a blocklist again.

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Thanks. woeking on stuff here, for example, the Topic referenced in that article has been modified to move recent traffic into a new lounfe Discussion. Modified that referenced Topic, made a comment myelf, adding in another Topic reference, and a Wiki page link.

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Reminds me of the Dashiell Hammett short story where the detective hero is looking at a sign reading "Only Genuine, Pre-War, Bonded American WHiskies sold here" and wondering how many false statements could be put into a single sentence.

-- rick

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  • 10 months later...

Yawn.

On slow news days, complain about your email being blocked.

Same rag, different author.

When the spam Medicine Is Worse Than The spam

spam Cops "the heck" with the innocent position is wrong

By Alan Shimel on Thu, 04/12/12 - 7:40am.

I am going to go on a bit of a rant here, so let me warn you up front. In fact I was so upset by the attitude of spam Cop that I have taken the unusual step of posting on both my own personal blog and on here, something I don't think I have done in my 2 years of writing on Network World. But the word needs to be spread about what I think is a very wrong attitude and policy.

In my 20+ years of working in technology and the Internet I have learned many lessons. One of the things I have learned is that when the medicine is worse than the sickness, it is time to get a new medicine. We need a new medicine to replace spam lists like spam Cop.

Yesterday I was mailing with some of my fellow board members of the West Boca Tackle Football league. I do so pretty regularly because as a board member there are always things that need to get done. All of a sudden my email was being refused by one of the ISPs of one of the members of the board. I got that nice bounce message with a link to find out why my mail was being refused as spam. More.

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West Boca Tackle Football league.

I don't remember for sure but I think this is the same bunch that has sent me game schedules, and notices of tryouts. Don't think I will travel from the Washington D.C. area.

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Hate it when a journalist (Shimel) misspells his own name - double when has the hide to poke fun at someone else's. Surely a shmiel? "Last night I got a long-winded reply from spam Cop by someone by the name of Don D'Minion (that should give you an idea of what we are dealing with here)." Don, long-winded? Certainly the words of a shmiel.

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Hate it when a journalist (Shimel) misspells his own name - double when has the hide to poke fun at someone else's. Surely a shmiel? "Last night I got a long-winded reply from spam Cop by someone by the name of Don D'Minion (that should give you an idea of what we are dealing with here)." Don, long-winded? Certainly the words of a shmiel.

Definitley a "shmiel" who needs to take more responsibility than they have. Common netiquette & courtesy preclude me from using the colourful expressions than I have..... :D

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Definitley a "shmiel" who needs to take more responsibility than they have. Common netiquette & courtesy preclude me from using the colourful expressions than I have..... :D

I suppose GoDaddy's mail server might get listed?

It would take massive amounts of reported spam before the SpamCop Blocklist were activated?

More likely his own computer is compromised

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I suppose GoDaddy's mail server might get listed?

...

Good point. westbocatacklefootball.com's own MX is 50.23.54.77 (softlayer) which looks pretty clean though used for some fairly heavy traffic (daily SB magnitude 2.2 "last month") which argues either a high degree of occasional responsible use or a compromise. I wonder if that one has been SCbl listed recently?

Don't see where GoDaddy (westbocatacklefootball.com's domain registrar) would come into the equation except that Mr Shimel mentioned it. Maybe he is running a separate "executive" server on GD's secureserver.net for the big knobs? Shmiels should be good at that (sorry, the Devil made me do it). GoDaddy (whatever the connection) does have just one or two servers listed in the SCbl or in the CBL at the moment (173.201.192.190 and 68.178.232.17 for the SCbl) but not the great swathes or blocks that he talks about. http://www.senderbase.org/senderbase_queri...ing=GoDaddy.com

If he was going to make a Federal case out of it (or publish opinion in a reputable public venue) Mr. Shimel would have some extra explaining/justification to do, I think. Well, he did warn it was a rant, presumably justifying the disconnection (at least to his own satisfaction) of his left brain hemisphere. I'm sure that was a great relief for him.

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