[Resolved] Spamcop eating Paypal payment notification e-mails

[chrism]

Just a warning to people that Spamcop seems to be "eating" payment notification e-mails from PayPal at present. It happened twice to me this morning (the second time I sat and watched it happen!).

I paid for something with PayPal and got the usual notification e-mail from "payment[at]paypal.com" in my ISP's inbox. When the mail was picked up by POP3 by Spamcop, though, there was no trace of the e-mail. Not in "Held Mail", not in "Trash", just gone!

To be sure that I wasn't imagining it, I bought something else, actually logged in to my ISP's web-mail interface and read the notification e-mail (leaving it on the server, obviously), shut down my PC's e-mail client, and then waited for Spamcop to do its POP3 mail collection from my ISP.

I logged onto Spamcop webmail, and sure enough, the PayPal e-mail had vanished (everything else was there in the inbox). "paypal.com" is in my "whitelist", and I don't have any webmail filters which delete anything. I am absolutely 101% certain that it's nowhere in "Held Mail" or "Trash" (I searched to confirm this).

My only thought is that perhaps Spamcop's virus scanner is picking it up as a false positive and deleting it.

I've reported the problem via the "Problem" button on webmail, but I thought that it might be as well to warn others about it.

Cheers,

Chris

[agsteele]

I am absolutely 101% certain that it's nowhere in "Held Mail" or "Trash" (I searched to confirm this).

My only thought is that perhaps Spamcop's virus scanner is picking it up as a false positive and deleting it.

Can you confirm that do not have Greylisting enabled?

Andrew

[DavidT]

On a bit of a tangent - is there any reason you're not having your mail automatically forwarded to SpamCop (which is the recommended method) rather than having SpamCop pop it?

DT

[chrism]

Can you confirm that do not have Greylisting enabled?

I don't, that's correct.

On a bit of a tangent - is there any reason you're not having your mail automatically forwarded to SpamCop (which is the recommended method) rather than having SpamCop pop it?

Unfortunately my ISP, Demon Internet in the UK, doesn't provide a mail forwarding facility.

[agsteele]

Well, I have to say that I'm a little confused about this. But problem is that we don't actually know what is happening along the journey

If you know the address of the PayPal sender you could try placing that in your personal whitelist to see if it makes any difference. I'm not hopeful but it is worth a try.

Otherwise you may want to use the formal 'Report a Problem' option by clicking the icon inside the webmail interface.

Andrew

[chrism]

Thanks Andrew,

As I said in my original post, I already have used the "Report a Problem" facility to report it. I've had an auto-response e-mail with the problem ref, but no follow-up as yet.

I agree that it is a very odd one, and it sounds a little unbelievable, but, as I say, I sat there and watched it happen myself. My ISP received a payment notification message from "payment[at]paypal.com", but when the mail was POP'd by Spamcop, the message simply wasn't there. And it happened not once, but twice.

I do have "paypal.com" in my whitelist, but the message seems to be getting deleted before it's hitting the filters. That's what makes me wonder if perhaps it's Spamcop's virus scanner which is triggering a false positive on it and deleting it.

Hopefully Jeff (or whoever) will be able to find time to look at it (I gave the times at which it happened in my problem report) and see if he can figure out what's going on.

I'll post a follow-up if I hear anything back. Thanks for taking an interest!

Best wishes,

Chris

[michaelanglo]

On a bit of a tangent - is there any reason you're not having your mail automatically forwarded to SpamCop (which is the recommended method) rather than having SpamCop pop it?

To address that topic, ie using POP rather than forward.

I have one of my mailboxen doing forward but trying another from a different supplier I found that it interacting badly with greylisting and had to revert to POP.

The difference lay in how the forwarding agent treated the Return-path: field. The first reset the field to a constant, the new one left it alone. The result seemed to be that the agent stopped forwarding any more mail until the greylist delay allowed the earlier mail item to be accepted and huge delays resulted. Whitelisted senders seemed to be OK but as soon as a non-whitelist item (such as spam) turned up there was a delay.

Greylisting doesn't seem to have a trusted relay feature so I had the choice of losing greylisting (which is doing a good job for direct to spamcop mail) or reverting to POP.

Suggestions ?

{...} used the "Report a Problem" facility to report it. I've had an auto-response e-mail with the problem ref, but no follow-up as yet.{...}

I too seems to be missing emails from PayPal.

I have just renewed my SpamCop email subscription with Corporate Email Services and, based what happened last year, I should have had two emails from PayPal.

04/11/08 11:06:21 GMT - receipt

26/10/08 15:05:12 GMT - Payment Cleared (from my bank, counts as a e-check).

Everything is fine on the PayPal history and my expiry date at

http://webmail.spamcop.net/horde/imp/spamcop/preferences.php has updated, but no emails were received.

I have SpamCop POP the mailbox in question (last year I POPed it directly). I don't have PayPal in my personal WhiteList or BlackList. Greylisting is on but that should be irrelevant to POPing.

I did receive one email from paypal. it was from paypal.co.uk

"... you've just sent an eCheque" 28 October 2008 08:22 GMT

and suggested I "Add a valid credit or debit card to your PayPal account now and you'll be able to make instant payments".

I have reported the above by email to JT

[chrism]

I don't mean to be impatient, but does anyone know how long it generally takes to receive a reply to a problem report? It's been three days now, and I've heard nothing, other than the initial "we've received your e-mail and will get back to you" auto-response.

[dbiel]

After 3 days, I would resend the report and reference the previous report as well

[chrism]

I never did get a response to my "Problem" report, but just to let people know, the problem appears to have been resolved. I've just bought another item and paid via PayPal, and this time the receipt for the transaction successfully appeared in my Spamcop mailbox.

If it was due to a "false positive" by Spamcop's virus scanner, possibly an updated virus signature database has cured it.

Anyway, whatever the cause was it seems to be OK now.

Thanks!

Chris

[turetzsr]

<snip>

just to let people know, the problem appears to have been resolved.

<snip>

...Thanks for taking the time to return here to let us know the good news, Chris! Based on your latest post, I am marking this SpamCop Forum thread as "Resolved."