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How to Prevent Automatic Deletion of Held Mail


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Greetings,

Summary:

One must check the E-mail in one's Held Mail folder on a regular basis, because SpamCop blocking often blocks non-spam E-mail, sending it to Held Mail, and the Held Mail is deleted automatically (if it's over two weeks old, if I remember correctly). This process can result in lost, non-spam, E-mail. The only way to prevent this is to "Tag Only" spam, rather than blocking it.

Background:

SpamCop spam blocking used to be very reliable: It only blocked spammers. However, this came at a cost: Everyone who wished to send E-mail to a SpamCop member had to manually request permission by submitting a form.

Apparently, the powers that be for SpamCop decided that this wasn't workable any longer. They setup a system that is much inferior regarding the quality of blocking, but is automatic. The biggest problem with this automatic system is that it often blocks good E-mail, by default sending it to Held Mail. This problem wouldn't be so bad, but SpamCop compounds it by automatically deleting old Held Mail.

The Solution:

1. Go to "Options: SpamCop Tools: Select your email filtering blacklists." and check the "Tag Only" checkbox.

2. In your E-mail client (or your own E-mail server?) setup a filter for E-mail with a "X-SpamCop-Disposition" header. (Details will be posted below.)

3. If possible, setup filtering in your E-mail client so that E-mail with the "X-SpamCop-Whitelisted" header is whitelisted (not blocked). I haven't been able to figure out how to do this in Netscape 7.x.

Notes:

I'm posting this solution because it is not well documented (It's not documented anywhere on the www.spamcop.net Web site, including the FAQ, manuals, etc. It's only documented in the "old discussion archives" (see http://news.spamcop.net/ ). The old discussion archives were virtually impossible for people to search, but they've recently been setup for search through Google. See http://www.spamcop.net/help.shtml .

I'm posting this solution now because I've seen a number of questions on this forum to the effect of "How can I handle all of this Held Mail?" or "How can I prevent SpamCop from deleting good E-mail?"

Sincerely,

Israel Steinmetz

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Greetings,

In your E-mail client (or your own E-mail server?) setup a filter for E-mail with a "X-SpamCop-Disposition" header.

That header identifies blocked E-mail.

I think this is not possible to setup this filtering with Microsoft E-mail products, such as Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express (because they don't allow header field names to be customized), but I know it's possible with Netscape 7.x.

It may be possible with Netscape 6.x, I'm not sure. But, Netscape 7.02 was the most stable, so it may be best to upgrade when possible. To download version 7.02, instead of a later version like 7.1 (which I personally feel is slightly less stable), see http://wp.netscape.com/download/archive/cl...archive70x.html .

To setup in Netscape 7.x, go to "Window: Mail and Newsgroups", then "Tools: Message Filters: New". Open the popup menu for the field name (it probably says "Subject" upon startup) and choose "Customize...". Add the "New message header" by filling in the field with "X-SpamCop-Disposition" and clicking "OK". Then, to add the filter, change the field name from "Subject" to "X-SpamCop-Disposition". The rule should be something like, "For incoming messages that match X-SpamCop-Disposition contains Blocked". Fill out the rest of the dialog box as applicable.

Sincerely,

Israel Steinmetz

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While you may have problems with good message being held by spamcop, I have not had a valid message held in several months. I receive between 100 and 200 spam per day and about 5-10 valid messages.

I suggest you investigate the whitelist function. I have a list of about 50 addresses or servers whitelisted, mostly for companies I have used that I agreed to receive updates from. That whitelist took me about 2 months to setup initially (just whitelisting held messages) and another few months to perfect, catching the less sent lists.

I report everything that gets held through the quick reporting and submit the few that slip by for full reporting.

To each their own.

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