AutoResponder

[Thomas]

Since a short time I'm using the anti-spam tool "iHateSpam" (a plugin for Outlook; www.sunbelt-software.com) which has been recommended widely and so far it's working very well. There it is possible to activate an automated report about received spam-mails also to SpamCop, so I signed up with SpamCop as well (the free spam Reporting Registration) to support the fight against spam.

After each report which has been sent, I receive an Autoresponder Email from SpamCop, with the message "SpamCop is now ready to process your spam". Is it possible to disable this autoResponder Email? I think it's not necessary to confirm the receipt of my report, and I already suffer so much by unwanted/unnecessary emails...

Do you have further suggestions to me concerning better use of SpamCop including supporting generally the fight against spam, and also concerning the program "iHateSpam"?

Thank you very much,

Thomas

[Derek T]

Hi Thomas and welcome.

I'm afraid that if you want to use the free service you have to live with the autoresponder. NO spam REPORTS ARE MADE until you click on the link in the response and complete (manually) the reporting process. This is how Spamcop is designed and helps prevent false positives; you have to press the 'report' button having reviewed Spamcop's parse.

OTOH for US$30 a year you can have a spmcop account and either

a. set up your ISP to forward to Spamcop and then POP the filtered mail from Spamcop's server or

b. use the spamcop address and get the filtered mail sent to your ISP

I use (a) because it allows me to change ISP and keep a permanent e-mail address.

hth

Derek

I don't work for Spamcop, just a happy customer!

[Thomas]

Thanks for the infos. I was thinking about this too, however actually it works pretty fine with the plugin from "iHateSpam".

So, it seems that SpamCop only causes me more work:

1) reporting the spam

2) receiving the AutoResponder and checking it

3) having to report it again manually by going to the linked website....?

My intention is to help fighting against spam, if possible on an automated base or with only few additional time and work needed... Or how can I contribute without so much additional hassle? Because I receive actually around 100 spams per day and really can't support anymore time to spend because of them

Thanks and regards,

Thomas

[Wazoo]

I think it's not necessary to confirm the receipt of my report,

The funny thing is, lots of folks complain about this e-mail .... but, if you look through some other Topics hee, you'll find that the lack of receiving these notifications causes some folks to start worrying, as not having them show up is the first sign of some kind of troubles / issues.

I receive actually around 100 spams per day and really can't support anymore time

Quality is better than quantity ... if you don't have time to do them all, just do the most recent 25, trash the rest ... Focus on the pron, drugs, ignore the get-rich-quick ... Just don't burn yourself out or, even worse, try to report everything in a rush or when you're tired ... just do what's comfortable ...

[Thomas]

Thanks for your infos. Another strange thing is the following: when I receive the AutoResponder, I have to click the link after the phrase "Use links to finish spam reporting" - and always when I did so, on the spams I reported, I got a webpage with some infos - and in red colour was marked: "No source IP address found, cannot proceed", "No tracking information found in header: UBE message forwarded: Probably not full headers - see FAQ: Email software FAQ no header".

So, the spam I forwarded was somehow incomplete? Maybe my plugin "iHateSpam" doesn't forward the necessary infos to SpamCop...

If I understand the system correctly, then the best would be to forward every spam to SpamCop. Is the help of the hugue SpamCop databank focussed mainly to the SpamCop Email account holders, or does SpamCop share this valuable info also with other databases?

Thomas

[StevenUnderwood]

1) reporting the spam

2) receiving the AutoResponder and checking it

3) having to report it again manually by going to the linked website....?

It is actually more correct to think of step 1) as actually submitting the spam, same as if you have gone to the web page and pasted it into the form there.

[Wazoo]

OK, let's go back to the beginning. You say you're using Outlook. No version number offered, so I'll ask if you've been to http://www.spamcop.net/fom-serve/cache/118.html yet? the "iHatespam" app isn't listed, so I have not a clue as to how well it works .. though noting that your first post said you were happy, but now there are problems. Did something change at your end?

The process is you submit the spam, it gets analyzed, then you receive that e-mail you say you don't want, at which time you go look at the report generated and it's only then that you would make a decision as to whether or not that report would actually go anywhere (based on the selection of checked boxes for addresses).

That you're now getting these error messages only states that whatever you're submitting has some issues that won't allow the SpamCop parsing tool to work successfully ... yes, it could be the spam, it could be the iHatespam thing, it could be one or more of a lot of things. Somehow, somebody has to see what it is that you're actually submitting in order to take a guess at what's going wrong. Can you add yourself to the e-mail complaint being sent to SpamCop so you can get a copy of that e-mail?

The database is used at SpamCop for filtering of the $30/year Filtered E-mail accounts, but the database is also available to the public as the SpamCop DNSbl, which is used by a lot of ISPs and numbers of folks that run their own mail-servers to help control the incoming spam.

[Thomas]

Thanks for your help, Wazoo, Steven and Derek.

I have Outlook XP, so as on the mentioned link XP isn't mentioned I guess that 2000 would cover also XP and 2003. The plugin "iHateSpam" works pretty well, it's a self-learning tool and already after 3 days it has practically no false positive anymore.

My aim is to participate as far as I can to fight against spam, that's also why I support reporting my spams to SpamCop. Within my plugin, I can set that spams are automatically reported to SpamCop which I did, and so my previous questions here in the board rised.

After receiving a spam which is automatically placed in my "spam Quarantine" inbox (instead of the normal in-box as recognized by "iHateSpam", I perform the following steps (the below-mentioned spam was received by my account "baumer[at]freesurf.ch"):

1) I send the report to spam; the copy forwarded to SpamCop looks like this:

***ABUSE REPORT MESSAGE IS ADDED AUTOMATICALLY HERE***

--begin full headers--

Return-Path: <a.sargentge[at]siba.fi>

Received: from freesurfsm1.sunrise.ch (194.230.0.98) by mail-fs.sunrise.ch (7.0.024.3)

        id 4049D6AA0010B2E8 for baumer[at]freesurf.ch; Tue, 9 Mar 2004 01:04:48 +0100

Received: from carleton.ca (PE164097021.user.veloxzone.com.br [200.164.97.21] (may be forged))

        by freesurfsm1.sunrise.ch (8.12.10/8.12.10) with ESMTP id i2904efF006052

        for <baumer[at]freesurf.ch>; Tue, 9 Mar 2004 01:04:46 +0100

Date: Tue, 09 Mar 2004 00:00:41 +0000

Message-ID: <2.2.32.200403090000410043609d[at]siba.fi>

X-Mailer: Windows Eudora Pro Version 2.2 (32)

From: "Allan Sargent" <a.sargentge[at]siba.fi>

Subject: =?iso-8859-1?b?UmU6ZW5oYW5jZSBlbmVyZ3k=?=

To: baumer[at]freesurf.ch

MIME-Version: 1.0

Content-Type: multipart/alternative;

boundary="----=_NextPart_000_03C2_9975CB6D.7883017B"

X-Scanned-By: MIMEDefang 2.38

--begin full message body source--

<html><body>

<center><!--skybtsVUo9rRq3a--><a href="http://www.qws3s.com/ghr/"><img src="http://www.dzxxz2sa.com/g9.gif" border=0></a></center>

<body></html>

2) I receive the SpamCop AutoResponder mail few minutes later, with the following text:

PLEASE HELP SUPPORT THIS SERVICE!

SpamCop is free.  However, if you like the service please pay for it: http://www.spamcop.net/upgradeaccount.shtml?tmdYrLvKvitK7AzR

SpamCop is now ready to process your spam.

Use links to finish spam reporting (members use cookie-login please!): http://www.spamcop.net/sc?id=z334365245z67...acea25642dc543z

The email which triggered this auto-response had the following headers:

Received: from claudius71.1web.ch (claudius71.1web.ch [217.172.169.231])

by sc-app2.verio.ironport.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1C8A2515935

for <submit.tmdYrLvKvitK7AzR[at]spam.spamcop.net>; Mon,  8 Mar 2004 16:09:44 -0800 (PST)

Received: from freesurf.ch (80-219-55-234.dclient.hispeed.ch [80.219.55.234])

by claudius71.1web.ch (8.12.6/8.11.3/SuSE Linux 8.11.1-0.5) with SMTP id i2909dVs021227

for <submit.tmdYrLvKvitK7AzR[at]spam.spamcop.net>; Tue, 9 Mar 2004 01:09:40 +0100

Message-ID: <165850-220043290938921[at]freesurf.ch>

From: "baumer[at]freesurf.ch" <baumer[at]freesurf.ch>

To: submit.tmdYrLvKvitK7AzR[at]spam.spamcop.net

Subject: UBE: Re:enhance energy

Date: Tue, 9 Mar 2004 01:09:38 +0100

MIME-Version: 1.0

Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII

3) After clicking on the mentioned link, I get an internet-page with the following content:

SpamCop version 1.3.4 © SpamCop.net, Inc. 1998-2004 All Rights Reserved

spam Header

This page may be saved for future reference:

http://www.spamcop.net/sc?id=z334365245z67...acea25642dc543z

Skip to Reports

UBE message forwarded:

View entire message

Parsing header:

No source IP address found, cannot proceed.

Add/edit your mailhost configuration

Finding full email headers

Submitting spam via email (may work better)

Example: What spam headers should look like

No tracking information found in header:

UBE message forwarded:

Probably not full headers - see FAQ:

Email software FAQ

no header

That's the process. Interestingly with all spams I received, I get the mentioned error-message at step 3 as above-mentioned, so possibly my plugin doesn't forward a message able to read by SpamCop....

If you have an idea how I can help supporting SpamCop, let me know - as I have over 100 spams everyday, it might help the community. However, if it's too complicated, it was at least a try ;-)

[Wazoo]

I see several things that don't look right, expecially fo an e-mail'd submittal.

***ABUSE REPORT MESSAGE IS ADDED AUTOMATICALLY HERE***

I'm hoping that you added this line yourself .... if not, there's one problem.

--begin full headers--

I'm gussing that you didn't add this line yourself, as I see another on later on "--begin full message body source--" which is definitly a bad situation.

Then we run into the problem with the way Outlook handles its stores, the lines Content-Type: multipart/alternative;

boundary="----=_NextPart_000_03C2_9975CB6D.7883017B"

whereas the body would have boundary lines with that string of data showing, but your example snippet is missing this bit of data.

I'm having to guess at this point that the iHatespam thing might be a good tool to generate the header / body output into a form that matches the needs of the two-part paste-your-spam-here boxes on the SpamCop web page ... but it doesn't work around the issues (and adds a couple of its own) of trying to handle an Outlook e-mail, especially in an e-mail'd submittal format.

[Thomas]

Yeah the first line "Abuse report message is added automatically here" is in the real email replaced by the default text which is an individual text reporting about the abuse of this email. I copied from my plugin "iHateSpam" just what they mentioned will be sent. I suppose that also the "begin full headers" might not be in the "real" email then, however I didn't find out yet how to copy myself into the addresses.

However I agree the main problem could lie somewhere else, like you mentioned. I will mention this to the helpdesk of "iHateSpam", so I hope that they might solve the problem...