Reporting problems today?

[Farelf]

Indeed, still up and down, processing at around one half of the normal rate:

http://forum.spamcop.net/forums/index.php?...&page=stats

We who are east of the international date line possibly have it a little easier than those with time zones in North America (lower volumes submitted during our business hours for processing). And American rats prefer to be nocturnal, the treadmill no doubt spools up higher during their night-time, that might be a factor.

[dra007]

I have seen slow downs on the reporting side for the last few days, sometime what appears as a total feeze...hope it gets fixed soon. But thanks for keeping us updated! I am in Europe now by the way at least 7 hours ahead of US, so my reporting is at fairly odd hours and certainly not at peak hours.

the stats show full gaps (complete blackouts, about 11 of them) just in the last few hours so it is serious enough http://forum.spamcop.net/forums/index.php?...&page=stats

[jik]

Wow, this is sort of ridiculous.

Problem has been affecting tons of users for a week and you still don't have a clue what's causing it?

What, did all the original authors of theSpamCop system quit to go work somewhere else, such that there's nobody left maintaining the thing who actually knows how it work?

And with such a huge problem going on for a week, how can it be that the announcements topic hasn't been updated to mention it right at the top?

When you couple this with the absurd amount of time it has taken you guys (still not done!) to implement working IPv6 address parsing, I think it's time for me to stop wasting my time reporting spam to SpamCop, which I've been doing faithfully for years.

[AG2]

i have this problem too, for the past few days i can't report any spam. A few days ago loading the spam report started to work very slow but eventually it got there... now i can't load it at all.

From how it looks on my end, this looks to me like a network router/switch/network interface that's cooked rather than a hdd problem...

[hjp]

[quote Please be assured we know there is a problem and we have engineers around the world working on it. The silence is simply because we don't have an answer yet.

Richard W

The above quote was posted on the Spamcop newsgroup by someone I believe associated with Spamcop. It makes me wonder what is going on.

[dra007]

looks like intermitent ddos attack...but I am only paranoid...at the same time there is a substantial increase in spam these last few days...10-100 fold above the usual flow! Also look at the stats, the reporting has gone down from >10 to <2mil...and the drop is consistent since last Friday, so there is a real cosequence of this slow down!

[jik]

People should be using the Spamhaus ZEN blocklist. It has virtually no false positives, and it blocks the vast majority of the spam I get -- I only report the stuff to SpamCop that gets through Spamhaus.

I didn't even notice the sharp uptick in spam in the past few days because Spamhaus blocked most of it automatically.

Here's the graph of mail into my mail server blocked by Spamhaus:

[NewView]

I've had ONE spam I've been trying to complete reporting for the last two days and keep getting the following:

Gateway Timeout

The proxy server did not receive a timely response from the upstream server.

Reference #1.63e4317.1341492737.9aac7d9

[Ex_Brit]

People should be using the Spamhaus ZEN blocklist. It has virtually no false positives, and it blocks the vast majority of the spam I get -- I only report the stuff to SpamCop that gets through Spamhaus.

I didn't even notice the sharp uptick in spam in the past few days because Spamhaus blocked most of it automatically.

Here's the graph of mail into my mail server blocked by Spamhaus:

Which one of the following is the ZEN one? I receive virtually no spam past the filters anyway, but thought I'd ask.

[jik]

You've got the Spamhaus SBL blocklist in that list, which is a subset of the ZEN blocklist. See http://www.spamhaus.org/zen/ for info about the ZEN list that I use. It's the only blocklist I use, and it does a remarkably good job at blocking the vast majority of the spam.

[edited] I just noticed that XBL and PBL are also in your list. ZEN is a combination of SBL, XBL, PBL and CSS. Since you're missing only CSS, you've probably already got most of what's in the ZEN list.

[Ex_Brit]

Thanks. If I'm missing anything it isn't my fault as I have every single choice there is on the Spamcop Mail Options pages checked. There is no other choice.

[csouter]

My spam hasn't increased in volume since the reporting problem has arisen, but I don't get an awful lot of spam anyway, 10 or 12 a day at most, but I still try to report every single one, just in case.

I just received one, logged into SpamCop, got in straight away, pasted the spam into the reporting box, etc, clicked on "report now," and it was done straight away!

Keeping my fingers crossed, especially for those of you who receive thousands of spams daily!

[jik]

Glad to hear it's working for you. It's still not working for me.

[Edited] Actually, it _is_ working for me now, albeit with some delays. Let's hope this means they've fixed the problem and it's going to stay working!

[hjp]

Worked for awhile but now it is busted again

[newsmedia]

This appears to be an iframe.dll issue as far as I have been able to acsertain.

Two weeks now and in that time have managed to follow through just 2 or 3 reports out of perhaps 30 or more.

[jik]

This appears to be an iframe.dll issue...

What does that mean?

[SpamCopAdmin]

[quote Please be assured we know there is a problem and we have engineers around the world working on it. The silence is simply because we don't have an answer yet.

Richard W

The above quote was posted on the Spamcop newsgroup by someone I believe associated with Spamcop. It makes me wonder what is going on.

Richard is a member of the SpamCop staff.

- Don D'Minion - SpamCop Admin -

- Service[at]Admin.SpamCop.net -

[newsmedia]

What does that mean?

When loading reported spam for final completion, the Spamcop system appears to use an embedded iframe on the page as this (iframe.dll) momentarilly flashes into the address bar - the page then hangs, and produces an error Internet Explorer cannot display this page.

I am surprised admin has not to date posted a meaningful reason for the problems affecting users.

[jik]

When loading reported spam for final completion, the Spamcop system appears to use an embedded iframe on the page as this (iframe.dll) momentarilly flashes into the address bar - the page then hangs, and produces an error Internet Explorer cannot display this page.

I don't know why you're seeing that, but it's a red herring. The problems SpamCop is having processing spam has nothing to do with iframe.dll. It occurs for people who aren't even using Windows.

[A.J.Mechelynck]

I don't know why you're seeing that, but it's a red herring. The problems SpamCop is having processing spam has nothing to do with iframe.dll. It occurs for people who aren't even using Windows.

Indeed. I'm on openSUSE Linux, and I've been having lots of Gateway Errors this week. Not solidly but almost.

[dcrampton]

Having the same issue here just like others. Sometimes the system seems to be working fine, while other times it is very slow or does not work.

Tried submitting a couple of spam around 9am EST, not successful at all. I got 2 different messages while attempting to submit the spam:

1)

An error occurred while processing your request. Reference #97.6dce8f18.1341492772.3ec2b67f

2)

Gateway Timeout

The proxy server did not receive a timely response from the upstream server.

Reference #1.6dce8f18.1341493155.3ec66ffa

[newsmedia]

Indeed. I'm on openSUSE Linux, and I've been having lots of Gateway Errors this week. Not solidly but almost.

K - thanks for that, as I had never seen this flash up on the address bar before these problems began and was wondering ...

[brashley46]

Just got 12 processed at once, woohoo! Except one of them was an IPv6 failure.

[turetzsr]

<snip>

Problem has been affecting tons of users for a week and you still don't have a clue what's causing it?

What, did all the original authors of theSpamCop system quit to go work somewhere else, such that there's nobody left maintaining the thing who actually knows how it work?

...Huh? Have you ever worked on a software project involving code that was developed by someone who assumed he'd be the only one ever touching it and therefore didn't do full documentation or use supportable coding methods? <g>

And with such a huge problem going on for a week, how can it be that the announcements topic hasn't been updated to mention it right at the top?

...Are you looking at "------>------> Latest and Current Announcements <------<------"? If so, you should see, as the third paragraph:

** New ** Reporting problems.

When you couple this with the absurd amount of time it has taken you guys (still not done!) to implement working IPv6 address parsing, I think it's time for me to stop wasting my time reporting spam to SpamCop, which I've been doing faithfully for years.

...Well, that's your call, of course, but considering this is a free (or nearly free tool) that does a lot of the legwork of finding abuse addresses to which to report spam and even sends the reports for you, it seems to me that putting up with the little inconvenience of having to Delete spam until the SpamCop parser comes back a small "price" to pay! <g>

[jik]

Are you looking at "------>------> Latest and Current Announcements <------<------"? If so, you should see, as the third paragraph:...

I don't know whether that text wasn't there before, or it was there but I glossed right over it because (a) it's content-free, as opposed to all the other blurbs in the paragraph which actually have some content in them and ( the charming phpBB style sheet makes links look like section headers.

And it doesn't help that there are blurbs in that announcement dated December 2011, November 2011, and even earlier. Why are those still there? If they would edit the announcement to only have current information in it, it'd be a lot easier to find the important stuff.

For that matter, it's asinine that they're using a phpBB thread as their status board. They should have a readl status page without absurd amounts of clutter which make it difficult to quickly find the important information.

But whatever. As you say, it's free, and I guess we get what we pay for.

Well, that's your call, of course, but considering this is a free (or nearly free tool) that does a lot of the legwork of finding abuse addresses to which to report spam and even sends the reports for you, it seems to me that putting up with the little inconvenience of having to Delete spam until the SpamCop parser comes back a small "price" to pay! <g>

I don't gain anything from reporting spam. I have a very good spam Bayesian spam filter which blocks the vast majority of the spam that gets through the Spamhaus ZEN blocklist, and learns from the ones that it fails to block so that they get blocked better in the future.

As such, I am reporting spam through SpamCop not for my own benefit, but rather to benefit the community.

I'm under the impression that it also financially benefits IronPort, since I believe that they use the data they get from spam reporting to help them construct blocklists they sell as a commercial service.

Given that there's very little benefit to me from reporting the spam through SpamCop, if it keeps being a pain in the ass to do because they can't keep their system up and running reliably, not to mention because more and more spam is going to be coming from IPv6 addresses that SpamCop can't handle, I'm just going to stop reporting.