Spamcop Alternatives?

[jrsherrard]

A few weeks ago, someone mentioned marxmail from computer tyme hosting as a possible alternative. Has anyone tried it out?

js

[rbrenner@spamcop.net]

I'm looking for a service that offers a HORDE email client and can duplicate all the folders I have here. (Not being successful)

I'm still checking out vfemail.net using their free account, and it does seem to meet your requirement. Their filtering capability isn't available in the free version, so I asked them about a free trial of filtering yesterday. (This also tests their responsiveness) No answer yet. But even if they don't reply, or don't reply quickly enough, I might go for a paid service level to try the filtering, because I'm happy enough with what I've seen so far.

Rick

[rbrenner@spamcop.net]

Does anyone know how to transfer a whitelist from this horde to another horde? Or how about even just downloading a whitelist from this horde?

Rick

[ViRGE]

One alternative that I've found that's working for me is Namecheap's OXmail based private email service.

https://www.namecheap.com/hosting/email.aspx

These days my email volume is rather low, so even though it's a pretty bare-bones plan at just 3GB of email storage it's big enough for my needs. They're not an anti-spam specialist like CESmail, but their default email filtering policies of SpamAssassin plus some RBLs (including Spamcop) is catching the limited amount of spam that ends up hitting me.

Since I already hold a domain through them - which I want to use for email purposes anyhow since Spamcop forwarding won't be forever - this ended up working well for $10/year plus the domain. Dirt easy to setup, a good webmail interface and full IMAP access, and enough inbox capacity/functionality to cover my needs.

[mschmitt]

Does anyone know how to transfer a whitelist from this horde to another horde? Or how about even just downloading a whitelist from this horde?

My solution for capturing the list was:

1. Select the table on the web page. It will also select the Delete column, but that's OK.
   
2. Copy
   
3. Paste into a Word document. It will paste it as a table.
   
4. Repeat for the rest of the whitelist pages.
   
5. Now in the Word document you can select just the first column, and copy and paste it elsewhere as straight text.
   

[Ex_Brit]

My solution for capturing the list was:

1. Select the table on the web page. It will also select the Delete column, but that's OK.
   
2. Copy
   
3. Paste into a Word document. It will paste it as a table.
   
4. Repeat for the rest of the whitelist pages.
   
5. Now in the Word document you can select just the first column, and copy and paste it elsewhere as straight text.
   

Great idea, but with a whitelist of 163 pages, quite a labour of love for want of a better expression ;-)

My new email client suggests the easiest way to form a whitelist is simply to add to the Address Book so am now figuring our the quickest way of doing that.

Thanks for the idea.

[Ex_Brit]

A word of caution to anyone trying the above with a large Whitelist like mine. I didn't realize Word has a maximum temp storage limit and got more than halfway through the 163 pages when it suddenly threw up an error and closed without saving anything at all.

Fortunately there was still a saved temp one from an earlier attempt with all my A to C's, so at least I don't have to start completely from scratch. Obviously this is going to need some concentration.

[mschmitt]

Great idea, but with a whitelist of 163 pages, quite a labour of love for want of a better expression ;-)

I tried downloading the range of pages with curl, but couldn't get it to authenticate.

Anyway, I decided to just rebuild the whitelist on the new email system (FastMail.fm) as needed. What is needed in the whitelist depends on how aggressive (and prone to incorrect classification) the email provider's filters are. So far FastMail has only been wrong once.

[Ex_Brit]

I'm using Fastmail too but haven't really looked into it too much yet but I figured the easiest way would be simply to add my Whitelist to their address book. In any case SC did say they would continue filtering for at least a year, unless I read everything wrong so will simply have SC forward mail to Fastmail for that year.

[Ex_Brit]

My solution for capturing the list was:

1. Select the table on the web page. It will also select the Delete column, but that's OK.
   
2. Copy
   
3. Paste into a Word document. It will paste it as a table.
   
4. Repeat for the rest of the whitelist pages.
   
5. Now in the Word document you can select just the first column, and copy and paste it elsewhere as straight text.
   

[at]mscmitt: It's that last line where everything breaks down for me. I can get rid of the columns OK and transfer the first one as .txt to Notepad (for instance), but if I save that as example.csv (using the All Files option of course), Fastmail for one, does not recognize it as a csv file.

It looks like I will just have to white list as needed over time. That's how my SC whitelist got so large as it represents years of saying OK to this and that.

Edit: I did get FM to accept a file but it all garbled so I had to delete the entries, and obviously it requires each entry to be separated not just by a line break but by a comma and I have no idea how to introduce a comma quickly after each line in a large document.

[Dave_L]

... and I have no idea how to introduce a comma quickly after each line in a large document.

A text editor such as Emacs comes in handy here.

Press F3 to begin defining a macro, Control-E to move to end of line, comma, down arrow to next line, F4 to finish macro. Then F4 repeatedly to add a comma to each successive line, and Bob's your uncle.

[Ex_Brit]

Appreciate the thought but there are simply too many and I just don't have the time to go to all that trouble. I'll let Fastmail learn as it goes along, the same way that SC did.

It already has my latest Address Book information anyway so should be OK for the most part.

Thanks anyway ;-)

[mschmitt]

It's that last line where everything breaks down for me. I can get rid of the columns OK and transfer the first one as .txt to Notepad (for instance), but if I save that as example.csv (using the All Files option of course), Fastmail for one, does not recognize it as a csv file.

Copy the column in Word, paste into Excel, save as .CSV.

It also works to paste the table from the whitelist page directly into Excel.

[Ex_Brit]

It still doesn't format the .csv entries correctly however. They need at least a comma after each line otherwise they import incorrectly.

[mschmitt]

It still doesn't format the .csv entries correctly however. They need at least a comma after each line otherwise they import incorrectly.

Here's one way to add the comma, in Excel:

1. Add a formula to the cell adjacent to your first whitelist entry: =A1&","
   
2. Fill that forumula down the column to the end of your list. (Or just double-click the fill handle; I learned that trick last week.)
   
3. Now we've got the commas appended, but they are in a formula. We want to save only one column in the .CSV; we can't get rid of the column without the commas because it will break the formula. So select the column with the commas, and then paste it elsewhere, but paste as Values Only.
   
4. Now you can delete the other columns, and save as .csv.
   

The method in Word would be to first get the addresses out of the table, and then replace all ^p with ,^p.

[Ex_Brit]

Hmmm, having never used Excel in my life this is a very steep learning curve....will give it a try with some test entries, thanks.

[Spamnophobic]

There's an easy way to do it in Word.

After step 5 in:

1. Select the table on the web page. It will also select the Delete column, but that's OK.
   
2. Copy
   
3. Paste into a Word document. It will paste it as a table.
   
4. Repeat for the rest of the whitelist pages.
   
5. Now in the Word document you can select just the first column, and copy and paste it elsewhere as straight text.
   

a. Paste the list in Notepad, it will copy as plain text.

b. Copy the whole list again in Notepad and paste it into a new Word document. It should now appear as plain text in Word.

c. Go to the beginning of the list and press control+h. The "Find and replace" box appears.

d. In the "Find and replace" box, in the "Find" field type ^p (Word calls this "paragraph mark" or somesuch - translating from Dutch Word here - but anyway it really means hard return),

e. In the "Replace with" field type ,^p (comma, hard return).

f. You can test one line with "Find next" if you wish.

g. Press "Replace all".

NB1: If you don't like the result, hit the undo button before you do anything else.

NB2: I have used a literal comma in my instructions above. Unless I am mistaken Excel by default uses a semicolon ( (no I don't mean a winkicon!) in what is unhelpfully called the "comma-separated values" (.csv) format. What the separator actually is on your machine depends on a Windows setting ... but that's another story

NB3: If your list is too long for Notepad, consider using another plain-text editor like Notepad++ or WordPad.

Hope this helps.

[Ex_Brit]

There's an easy way to do it in Word.

After step 5 in:

a. Paste the list in Notepad, it will copy as plain text.

b. Copy the whole list again in Notepad and paste it into a new Word document. It should now appear as plain text in Word.

c. Go to the beginning of the list and press control+h. The "Find and replace" box appears.

d. In the "Find and replace" box, in the "Find" field type ^p (Word calls this "paragraph mark" or somesuch - translating from Dutch Word here - but anyway it really means hard return),

e. In the "Replace with" field type ,^p (comma, hard return).

f. You can test one line with "Find next" if you wish.

g. Press "Replace all".

NB1: If you don't like the result, hit the undo button before you do anything else.

NB2: I have used a literal comma in my instructions above. Unless I am mistaken Excel by default uses a semicolon ( (no I don't mean a winkicon!) in what is unhelpfully called the "comma-separated values" (.csv) format. What the separator actually is on your machine depends on a Windows setting ... but that's another story

NB3: If your list is too long for Notepad, consider using another plain-text editor like Notepad++ or WordPad.

Hope this helps.

The Control - H thing also applies to Notepad, however I can't get the above to work in either Word or Notepad, it says found 3 (out of hundreds) but doesn't change anything. Tried it with semi-colon too just in case. It's line break that's applicable here, not paragraph and that is the symbol for it as far as I can tell, but alas it doesn't work for me.

[Spamnophobic]

Control+h (control key plus lower case aitch) should bring up "Find and replace" in both Notepad and Word (and a lot of other utilities besides) but the Find and replace function in Word has extra options, including many to look for nonprinting characters like hard return (line break). You can find them via the "More" and "Special" options, but the code for hard return is ^p.

I would post a screenprint of the dialogue box, but I can't find any way to upload images to this forum. Perhaps someone else will be along to help with that (blush!)

In the box that says "Replace with" you literally type in ;^p to give the "string" you are going to replace the ^p with. Here I literally mean the ^ character, not "Control" which it is sometimes used as an abbreviation for.

it says found 3 (out of hundreds) but doesn't change anything.

Are you sure you're not hitting ctrl+f (Find)? That brings up a completely new Find function in recent versions of Word, with numbers of hits.

[Ex_Brit]

No I was hitting "Replace All".

[Spamnophobic]

I'm totally puzzled about why Word isn't doing its thing for you. I've run through the procedure now in Word 2007 and in Word 2010. My humble whitelist only ran to 1,5 pages in plain text, but with some exponential cutting and pasting I created lists of 264 pages (Word 2007) and 416 pages (Word 2010).

Both worked as expected, with messages of "Word has completed its search of the document and has made 10,811 replacements" (2007) and "Document search completed. 21,630 items were replaced" (2010, translated from Dutch).

If you're still stuck let me know and I'll PM you an e-mail address to which you can send me some screenprints. I feel it must be something really simple.

[Ex_Brit]

That's very kind of you but I think I'm going to forget the exercise. I built the SC whitelist over the years by simply adding things as they occurred and I can do the same with FM.

I think I see why it's not doing it - I can't seem to get rid of the original cell spacing even when I copy the address column into something else as plain text - spaces occurring after the characters to the end of the line I mean.

As I have 163 pages of them, I think it's too big a job for me to even attempt as I am so busy with other stuff. The list also needs some major editing I've noticed, so probably for that reaosn alone I think I'll forget about this exercise!!

Sorry to sound like a defeatist but that's where things are right now. ;-/

[mschmitt]

I think I see why it's not doing it - I can't seem to get rid of the original cell spacing even when I copy the address column into something else as plain text - spaces occurring after the characters to the end of the line I mean.

In Word, replace all " ^p" with "^p". That removes one trailing space. Keep hitting replace all until Word says it can't find anything more to replace.

[Ex_Brit]

Thanks but that would take me about a year. I'll pass on that.

[Spamnophobic]

You could just hit "Replace all". The space was probably the reason the "Find" part of "Find and replace" wasn't working. Replacing 21,630 items took me less than a second. And if it goes wrong just hit undo.