I feel I need more info....

[bobbear 0]

After the crash last night I saw the new mailhost system on the forum and thought "should I dive in and try this?" Then I read everything explanatory I could, (not much), and realised I didn't understand it and hadn't a clue what I would be diving into, so it rather put me off and I am a technophile, pretty computer literate, an ex-programmer in assembler and quite confident at setting up pop and smtp accounts, so what chance has a bit of a technophobe got, I wonder? Would the instructions pass a SIT (Standard Idiot Test - something I always used to submit my programs to with sometimes eye-opening results....).

Pardon my ignorance, but even the generic term 'mailhost' is not clear to me. Are we talking about pop3 servers here or webmail host servers or both or neither?

My setup, (OE6 under W2k pro), consists of one broadband account (Metronet) with associated pop & smtp mail servers together with a total of 14 other pop3 PAYG dialup accounts with 10 other ISP's. The thought of setting that lot up worries me.....

I assume by mail forwarding you mean the forwarding of webmail to a pop3 account. That looks even more complicated to set up and get right. Fortunately I don't do that - if a webmail account doesn't allow direct pop access I don't use it.

I know at the end of the day I will have to decide whether to dive into the new system or stop using SpamCop which would be a shame - I like doing my bit conscientiously. I know I should try the new system first, but like a lot of others, (I guess), perhaps I should wait a while until a few more bugs are squashed......

[Miss Betsy 0]

I am not technically fluent and I haven't been following the mailhosts issues because everything worked just as it was supposed to for me.

However, I think that essentially what it does is identify all the servers that you submit spam from. When you are set up, the parser stops if the received lines don't match your 'profile' (I don't know what it is really called) and won't parse any further. That means that one can't parse someone else's spam for them (and cancel of course) to help them troubleshoot.

Basically what it does is prevent people from reporting their own server and perhaps, in ways I don't understand, prevents spammers from forging things to fool the parser.

Since you are technically inclined, you will probably need more information, but IIUC, it really is not that much of a change in the overall concept (the parser already didn't send one's received lines for relay checks after the first time, for instance).

Miss Betsy

[turetzsr 0]

Hi, bobbear,

...From my own experience, I can support what Miss Betsy had to say.

[Ellen 0]

After the crash last night I saw the new mailhost system on the forum and thought "should I dive in and try this?" Then I read everything explanatory I could, (not much), and realised I didn't understand it and hadn't a clue what I would be diving into, so it rather put me off and I am a technophile, pretty computer literate, an ex-programmer in assembler and quite confident at setting up pop and smtp accounts, so what chance has a bit of a technophobe got, I wonder? Would the instructions pass a SIT (Standard Idiot Test - something I always used to submit my programs to with sometimes eye-opening results....).

Pardon my ignorance, but even the generic term 'mailhost' is not clear to me. Are we talking about pop3 servers here or webmail host servers or both or neither?

My setup, (OE6 under W2k pro), consists of one broadband account (Metronet) with associated pop & smtp mail servers together with a total of 14 other pop3 PAYG dialup accounts with 10 other ISP's. The thought of setting that lot up worries me.....

I assume by mail forwarding you mean the forwarding of webmail to a pop3 account. That looks even more complicated to set up and get right. Fortunately I don't do that - if a webmail account doesn't allow direct pop access I don't use it.

I know at the end of the day I will have to decide whether to dive into the new system or stop using SpamCop which would be a shame - I like doing my bit conscientiously. I know I should try the new system first, but like a lot of others, (I guess), perhaps I should wait a while until a few more bugs are squashed......

Basically you will be identifying to the system the servers and the paths that you use to get all your mail -- so if you have 10 email addresses (or some other number) on 10 different ISPs/hosting companies/freemail systems/etc then you will need to process thru the "add new mailhost" that number of times. If you have multiple email addresses at one provider then you only need to do mailhosts once for all of those.

So yes you have to add all the servers that you pop or which forward to you. During the process of setting up the mailhosts you should not be reporting *any* spam until they are all set up so you want to pick a time to start when you can work with the process and get it completed -- and saying "never" is not good :-)

Admittedly it will be time consuming to get it all set up but once it is done it is done. In a couple of weeks, we are going to do some serious work on reworking some of the explanantions etc so if you want to wait til then that's fine. We need to get this pushed out to all the users so sooner rather than later you will have to face up to it.

It really is beneficial as it lets the system recognize forged headers which nowadays can look more RFC compliant and real than the real received headers that some server sstamp.

[bobbear 0]

Thanks for that, Ellen. I appreciate the reason for the change and I shall certainly have a bash at it - I won't give up on SpamCop without at least trying to set it up for all my hosts. This is where I regret having accumulated so many accounts...

I would just have liked to have been clearer about exactly what information is required before I dove in, (with so many accounts I'm thinking surely it would be easier to have it all to hand first?), as it isn't clear to me how it works, e.g. you say:

"So yes you have to add all the servers that you pop or which forward to you"

and I can't see how that can be the pop server addresses, e.g. pop.freeserve.com (or pop.freeserve.net or pop.wanadoo.com - multiple names map to the same server in this example, by the way), as that doesn't appear in the header of received e-mail on Wanadoo/Freeserve, but mwinf3001.me.freeserve.com (SMTP Server) does.

Perhaps I'm trying to think too deep about it with just too little information up front to go on. The easiest way is just to give it a try and see what happens.....

[StevenUnderwood 0]

I can't see how that can be the pop server addresses, e.g. pop.freeserve.com (or pop.freeserve.net or pop.wanadoo.com - multiple names map to the same server in this example, by the way), as that doesn't appear in the header of received e-mail on Wanadoo/Freeserve, but mwinf3001.me.freeserve.com (SMTP Server) does.

Perhaps Ellen should have said all servers that accept or process your email messages. You are correct that if you pop directly from freeserve, the headers will not show that. But if you use, for instance, a spamcop account to pop it from there, the IP's will be there as spamcop adds the header for that transaction.

[Ellen 0]

I can't see how that can be the pop server addresses, e.g. pop.freeserve.com (or pop.freeserve.net or pop.wanadoo.com - multiple names map to the same server in this example, by the way), as that doesn't appear in the header of received e-mail on Wanadoo/Freeserve, but mwinf3001.me.freeserve.com (SMTP Server) does.

Perhaps Ellen should have said all servers that accept or process your email messages. You are correct that if you pop directly from freeserve, the headers will not show that. But if you use, for instance, a spamcop account to pop it from there, the IP's will be there as spamcop adds the header for that transaction.

Thanks Steve -- a better way of saying it :-) And bobbear, I think you are over anlayzing it :-) but yes if you have a whole bunch of email addresses hither and yon you will have to do a lot of mailhosts getting probes/returning probes as there is no super secret speedy way for me to do that for you :-(