Spamcop reporting ME as spammer when sending repor

[hucker]

Since reporting spam has little or no effect, if there ain't a reliable one-click method, I won't bother. If you have time to waste sending reports that are never read, go ahead, but I don't see the point.

[turetzsr]

Since reporting spam has little or no effect, if there ain't a reliable one-click method, I won't bother.  If you have time to waste sending reports that are never read, go ahead, but I don't see the point.

29594[/snapback]

...Well, glad you took the time to check it out a bit; sorry it didn't meet your needs. If you find something better and you're inclined to return here to tell us about it, let us know!

[Vanguard]

Your pliers are the equivalent to another spamcop type service which also sends dodgy reports.

I won't be trying anything.  If there is any risk of getting reported myself, I simply won't bother anymore.  And I've noticed the same spams from the same domains coming up over and over again - reporting spams to ISPs doesn't work.  Some ISPs must be ignoring reports.  Until it's a criminal offence to spam, we're stuck with it.

29560[/snapback]

Reporting the spams to the ISPs (actually the e-mail providers) only gives them the opportunity, if they have the desire, to clean up their service to keep them from eventually getting blacklisted. Whether or not they cleanup their e-mail service doesn't prevent you from using the DNSBLs (DNS blacklists) to block spam, so you and others reporting spam will update the blacklists of known spam sources and using those blacklists will eliminate getting more spam from those identified spam sources. You can report all you want but don't rely on e-mail providers being nice. If you don't report bad food or service to the restaurant manager, they won't know there is a problem or its severity. Even when you do report the problem, it's still their choice whether or not they do anything about it.

If you use SpamCop then you should also be implementing DNSBLs to avoid getting the spam. If you don't want to pay SpamCop for their spam-free e-mail service, you could use SpamPal or Mailwasher to use the DNSBLs to avoid the spam. What's the point of reporting spam when you already know the e-mail providers are likely to ignore the problem or won't address the problem immediately? To reflect their spamminess in a blacklist that you actually USE. Many blacklists don't even bother notifying the e-mail providers of the spam but just update their blacklist with every spam report or with their automated spam detection methods.

Some e-mail providers do use the spam reports whether they come from SpamCop or directly from you. Some don't. Are you going to rely on the nicesness of e-mail providers to eliminate spam from your mailbox? Get real. Will a burglar stop taking your stuff while you simply nag at them to stop it? You lock your doors and maybe even bar your windows, and that what is USING the blacklist(s) provides to you.

[hucker]

Reporting the spams to the ISPs (actually the e-mail providers) only gives them the opportunity, if they have the desire, to clean up their service to keep them from eventually getting blacklisted.  Whether or not they cleanup their e-mail service doesn't prevent you from using the DNSBLs (DNS blacklists) to block spam, so you and others reporting spam will update the blacklists of known spam sources and using those blacklists will eliminate getting more spam from those identified spam sources.

29620[/snapback]

The trouble with blacklists is they block a provider. There may also be legitimate senders of email on that provider. To avoid seeing spam, the best way is a learning filter.

[dra007]

We are not going to convert you into a user. It is quite obvious you are totally off track and do not understand either the philosophy or use of SC and are only here to vent frustrations. Congratulations, you have made it on my munchkintoll list. For your enlightment SC does not block anything, let alone providers, it only reports IPs that spew spam so responsive ISPs can take action while the spew is in progress. If you took your time to google this site there are numerous examples of spammers being shut down in response to our reports. True, there are the likes of kornet and cnc.noc, but no method has been productive in stopping such idiots, they are famous for their spam deeds here and elsewhere.

[hucker]

For your enlightment SC does not block anything, let alone providers,

29623[/snapback]

I never said it did, read what I wrote again. I said BLACKLISTS do. Which is only going to block legitimate emails from that provider.

If you took your time to google this site there are numerous examples of spammers being shut down in response to our reports. True, there are the likes of kornet and cnc.noc, but no method has been productive in stopping such idiots, they are famous for their spam deeds here and elsewhere.

29623[/snapback]

And if you shut a spammer out of his ISP, he'll move to another one, until he finds a kornet.

[Vanguard]

The trouble with blacklists is they block a provider.  There may also be legitimate senders of email on that provider.  To avoid seeing spam, the best way is a learning filter.

29621[/snapback]

I use SpamPal. It has a Bayesian plug-in so it will "learn" like you mention. It helps if you have a set of good e-mails and a set of spam mails to feed it as good and bad to preload your Bayes database; otherwise, you'll spend some time with it in learn mode weighting keywords in the e-mails you receive after installing and enabling it. Unlike other Bayesian filters which work alone and so they can only based their judgement regarding spamminess on just the content of the e-mails, the SpamPal Bayesian plug-in can learn from SpamPal's blacklists and from the other plug-ins. This helps the Bayesian filter keep in sync as to what is spam because it has been identified as such using other methods than just a weighted database of words. It also has a Reclassify window that you can use to change the status of an e-mail from spam to good (false positive) or from good to spam (false negative) in case the spam got missed by everything else, including the Bayesian filter, or you consider it a false positive. Don't expect Bayesian filters to be some omnipotent spam catching mechanism. The technique is fallible. Some spam actually tries to poison the Bayesian filter (they look to be targeting the one in Outlook 2003 because the one in SpamPal has a configurable word expiry to eliminate the "noise" floor of its database).

SpamPal also uses DNSBLs. Blacklists are its primary means of detecting spam. However, it is up to YOU to investigate how each blacklist works and what they list. SPEWS, for example, is not interested in providing a list of actual spammers. They are interested in penalizing ISPs by cutting a wide swath of their IP addresses; i.e., they rate the trustworthiness or spamminess of an ISP or e-mail provider rather than identify the spammers there. They rely on the victims at the spam-lazy or spam-friendly ISP that are getting notified that their e-mails are getting block by their recipient to complain to their ISP. SPEWS wants to coerce the victims at the penalized domain to complain to that domain. Other blacklists are more focused at actually identifying the spammers, a task that is difficult because they keep moving. SPEWS and SORBS don't update their lists very frequently. When my IP lease expired and I got a new IP address from my ISP's IP pool, it was in SORBS blacklist but the last update on whomever they thought was spamming from it was over 3 months old. SORBS was responsive and manually updated their records the next day, but obviously the 3-month old record (and other remarks about them) show that they are slow to update, so to a degree they are like SPEWS which is quick to add, cut a wide swath, and slow to update (but their intent is not to be current to identify spammers but to rate a domain regarding trust or spamminess). Investigate the blacklists you use.

Another example is blacklisting by country. SpamPal lets me do that. I can blacklist e-mails that originate from certain countries. That doesn't mean all e-mails from those countries are spam. However, I do not correspond with any entity in those countries so any e-mails originating from there were unsolicited. SpamPal does have a Logfile plug-in that retains a text-only version of all spam-tagged e-mails. This lets you recover from a false positive. That way I can have my e-mail monitor (Magic Mail Monitor) where I can define rules that delete spam-tagged e-mails off my mail server without every having to download them (make sure to test only on headers) but still have enough info in the logs to identify the sender should a false positive occur. Unfortunately the Logfile plug-in does not automatically expire the logfiles so I wrote a batch file that kills logfiles over a specified number of days old and then add it to Task Scheduler (and I gave a copy of the batch file to the plug-in author who has a link to download it from his site).

Another means of avoiding spam is to block any e-mails that originate from a mail server that has a dynamically assigned IP address. Dial-up and cable/DSL users have dynamic IP addresses. Their zombied hosts running a mailer trojan will spew out its spam but SpamPal's MXblock plug-in will see it came from a dynamic IP address and tag it as spam. I did edit the MXblock plug-in's config.dat file to specify the SpamHaus DUL (dynamic IP list) rather than use the outdated MXEasy list. It has worked many times to identify spam that came from zombied users.

SpamPal has a RegEx plug-in if you want to define regular expressions which go far beyond what you can define using the rules in your e-mail client. SpamPal and its other plug-ins have been so successful at identifying spam that I have never need to use the RegEx plug-in. The HTMLmodify plug-in not only makes HTML-formatted e-mails more safe (although your first defense should be using the Restricted Sites security zone set to its High level) but also detects spammy mails based on their HTML characteristics, like too many bogus HTML tages (spammers will hide their message inside an illegal tag because it won't get rendered and will show as e-mail but many filters will strip out any strings that look like HTML tags), URL obfuscation (which it will de-obfuscate),

The URLbody plug-in will identify spam based on a URL link within the body of the message that goes to a known (i.e., blacklisted) spam site. However, while it sounds nice, it can be somewhat aggressive. Like the Bayesian plug-in, the URLbody plug-in must download the entire message so it can look inside the body.

If you want to eliminate spam then YOU will have to take action to do so. Stop relying on reporting the spam to the ISPs in some altruistic hope that those ISPs will be oh so ever responsive to those reports. The reports do help but my guess is that put all of maybe 10% of a dent in the volume of spam. You'll need to be aggressive and use something more than complaints to avoid getting spam. With SpamPal, you get an entire suite of different methods to detect spam, and SpamPal is free. If you are looking only for one method to identify spam, say, Bayesian, then you could try SpamBayes. It runs as an Outlook plug-in but, I believe, it will also run as a proxy, like SpamPal, so any POP3/SMTP compliant e-mail client can use it. SpamPal has its own forums for support. Buy a commercial product if you have the need to call someone for support. But do something more than just report the spam.

Whining about spam and bitching to ISPs and e-mail providers is not going to eliminate the spam in your Inbox. It will eliminate some. I report spam through SpamCop not only to bitch to the e-mail providers but also to update SpamCop's blacklist which gets used in SpamPal. Whether the e-mail providers uses the SpamCop report or not, SpamCop's blacklist gets updated and I get the benefit of not getting more spam from that source (if there are enough reports about the spam source). Whining only works to a small degree, so choose to control what gets delivered in the first place.

[latesunday]

hucker, if you are going to attrite, then attrite. it is ironic, though, that you won't put any effort into checking your reports, but you'll evidently put plenty of time and effort into making pointless and semantic responses in this discussion. these people aren't trying to convert you, they're trying to simply explain to you what SpamCop is and how it works. you ought to be thanking these members for all the time and consideration they've given your posts. to think of all the thought they've put into their responses, knowing neither they nor SpamCop will be getting anything back in return.

[hucker]

hucker, if you are going to attrite, then attrite. it is ironic, though, that you won't put any effort into checking your reports, but you'll evidently put plenty of time and effort into making pointless and semantic responses in this discussion. these people aren't trying to convert you, they're trying to simply explain to you what SpamCop is and how it works. you ought to be thanking these members for all the time and consideration they've given your posts. to think of all the thought they've put into their responses, knowing neither they nor SpamCop will be getting anything back in return.

29640[/snapback]

All I'm doing is stating spamcop is not safe to use. And checking the reports? May as well write them myself if I'm going to have to spend time on it. And spmmers don't deserve time or money spent on them, even if it is to stop them.

[latesunday]

All I'm doing is stating spamcop is not safe to use.  And checking the reports?  May as well write them myself if I'm going to have to spend time on it.  And spmmers don't deserve time or money spent on them, even if it is to stop them.

29641[/snapback]

OK, then, write them yourself; and when you report yourself you'll only have you to blame. I mean, as they've said countless times: SpamCop is a tool. If you don't like the tool, then don't use it. None of us are pressuring you to be a SpamCop user. But if your point is that this tool isn't good and not worth using because it isn't 100% automated while being 100% accurate, I don't think it is a very good one.

Your options seem to be to use SpamCop correctly (i.e. open your eyes and read the report before you submit it, so you don't shoot yourself in the foot); Don't use SpamCop and deal with spam; or as you've pointed out do it yourself.

And from the sound of it, you seem to know what's wrong with everything. So, why don't you take your vast collection of wisdom (you've been able to shoot everything down from analogies to spam-reporting technologies) and go build yourself a better service?

I personally love SpamCop for a lot of reasons. But you know what? I still get a lot of spam. So, trust me, I look forward to the day when SpamHucker eradicates spam. In the meantime, all you're doing is disrespecting the time and effort all of these people have put into trying to explain SC and help you. And, again, they ask for nothing in return.

And, yet, you come right back with another 1 - 2 sentence semantic response just for the sake of being difficult. My suggestion: 1. Say thanks for the responses. 2. Walk away from SpamCop. 3. Build a better service.

[hucker]

And from the sound of it, you seem to know what's wrong with everything. So, why don't you take your vast collection of wisdom (you've been able to shoot everything down from analogies to spam-reporting technologies) and go build yourself a better service?

29642[/snapback]

Because reporting spam gets you nowhere.

[latesunday]

Because reporting spam gets you nowhere.

29645[/snapback]

I'm confused as to how these totally pointless responses are getting you somewhere. I mean, first of all, reporting spam DOES get you somewhere. You yourself admitted it - you reported yourself and there was a cosequence. So it DID get you somewhere (even if you didn't like where). You could also punch in a keyword or two into Google (too much work for you?) and find that SpamCop has done a hell of a lot of good in terms of shutting down spammers.

The problem, Hucker, is on your end. You're approach is lazy, negative, and ultimately self-defeating. You see, reporting spam gets many of us somewhere. But you get yourself nowehere when you refuse to use a tool correctly and you simply accept that spam will always be a part of your life.

So to be more accurate: Sitting around and being totally helpless gets you nowhere. You should know that more than anyone.

[hucker]

I mean, first of all, reporting spam DOES get you somewhere. You yourself admitted it - you reported yourself and there was a cosequence. So it DID get you somewhere (even if you didn't like where). You could also punch in a keyword or two into Google (too much work for you?) and find that SpamCop has done a hell of a lot of good in terms of shutting down spammers.

29647[/snapback]

Shutting down spammers using decent ISPs, yes. But they just move to one of the dodgy ones. Why do you think 99% of spam comes from kornet etc?

[Jeff G.]

Shutting down spammers using decent ISPs, yes.  But they just move to one of the dodgy ones.  Why do you think 99% of spam comes from kornet etc?

29648[/snapback]

This is because kornet's ISPs and peers refuse to disconnect or even discipline it for harboring spammers.

[Vanguard]

I'm starting to suspect we got ourselves a troll here.

[Wazoo]

Came in from mowing the yard, hot, sweaty, not in the best of moods here. Thought about splitting some of this stuff off and moving it to the Lounge area .. but I'm actually not feeling all that charitable right now ... As hucker has said "good-bye" a few times already .... this Topic is being closed. The "Help" aspect of this discussion appears to need no more wasted effort. Thanks to all that tried.