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Is spamcop useless?


Miss Betsy

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SmapCop useless? Depends on what you're looking at. If you judge it by how much less spam you receive after using it for some time, I can say it hasn't stopped any junk mail from reaching my mailboxes. Even so, I gladly continue reporting spam because I support its mission.

The reporting frequency is often at around twenty reports per second, that's almost two million reports per day. It's a way of collecting much of the spam received by email users. There may not be an effective means to cut spammers off, but at least the statistics can be collected. Statistics can be very useful.

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I gladly continue reporting spam because I support its mission.

Obviously, if this was simply an exercise in futility no one would be so patient.

The question is what fraction of general population is reporting...Say if it's less than 10% that is probably not representative of the population vulnerable to recieving spam...I can only speak for myself...The spam I recieve became abusive only recently, even though I have used e-mail for many years and my e-mail IPS is attacked by trojan horses and spam generating viruses on a constant basis ...There lies the mistery, if the statistic is not representative of the general population what use can it serve? Are we dealing with an "orphan" like, rare disease? If the answer is yes, our attempts at curing the disease may not serve us in the end...I don't know if I am making any sense, bottom line is that I feel I am in a fight, I support that fight, and if the only way I can make a contribution is with my reports I am ready to continue doing it...

And now that I manage to develop a classic circular argument, let's see who will break it!

:unsure:

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the efforts to get past filters seem to me to be attractive to the kind of mind that creates viruses. I sometimes wonder if a lot of spam is not intended to sell anything, but created just to get past filters

Interesting point, I am usin Cloudmark SpamNet which detects previously reported spam deletes it and sends it to a spam folder...I find that convenient as I don't have to sieve through the inbox manually....Yet every few days the same spam will make it past the block....most of the time with a 'friendly' virus attached (an attachment which would normally be filtered by my servers before reaching my inbox)...

Obviously, this makes me wonder if the action is quite deliberate...Incidentally, I am a scientist, trained to make sense of observations and patterns...However chaotic this spam business may seem....I can't help but recognize a pattern in it, and a malicious intent...

:angry:

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The question is what fraction of general population is reporting

These numbers are dang near impossible to come up with. For instance, if I talk of the thousand plus computer users that I've had occasion to offer some sort of hands-on support over the last few years, I can still tell you that I'm the only person that I know of that actually reports spam. That would make the answer to your query pretty dang small.

The same thing comes up with the info paga for the BL ... somebody comes in with the bitch that it only shows "seen sending mail 796 times" and "10 complaints" .. arguing that they are a "large ISP" and sned out multiple thousands of e-mails a day. It all goes to scaling .. the SpamCop system isn't hooked up directly to that ISP, so it only sees the BL requests from those 'special' other ISP's to come up with that "796" number ... but if you do the percentages, that 10 complaints via SpamCop (could) represent the thousands of actual recipients of the same spam spew .. as in my example above, one report from me, and to be fair, let's say that less than a quarter of those "thousand plus" may have somehow gotten onto the same "list" .... I'll let you play with the math (got NASCAR on the tube right now <g>)

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Obviously, this makes me wonder if the action is quite deliberate...Incidentally, I am a scientist, trained to make sense of observations and patterns...However chaotic this spam business may seem....I can't help but recognize a pattern in it, and a malicious intent...

There may a deliberate intent if the person is just trying to get past a filter - to match wits with the filter maker. But his maliciousness is random - rather like the person who litters and an animal cuts its paw or a bird chokes on plastic or who doesn't keep his auto in good order and thus causes an accident when the part breaks or someone doesn't see him because the headlights are out.

Most of the spam, however, is sent with the intent of finding one buyer out of thousands of emails. The fact that it annoys thousands of people, that it costs people money to receive, is irrelevant to the spammer. They simply don't care.

most of the time with a 'friendly' virus attached (an attachment which would normally be filtered by my servers before reaching my inbox)...

There are no such things as 'friendly' viruses. Most spam does not use attachments - though there are some that do. If it is an attachment that contains a virus, then it is not the kind of spam that is reportable through spamcop. Usually, but not always, if you report the virus to the ISP manually, the virus stops.

There is someone else who has mentioned that he receives viruses that are defanged in conjunction with spam reporting, but I can't remember who. What most people receive is clearly distinguishable as a virus or as ube.

Miss Betsy

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