How to Submit Spam for Reporting

[Jeff G.]

Via email:

Submitting spam for reporting via email is covered in general at SpamCop.net - SpamCop FAQ: How do I submit spam via email?

If you forward the spam to SpamCop (using your submit email address to SpamCop), make sure you forward it as an attachment. Forwarding inline will strip out all the headers from the original spam and make your report worthless. Configure your email client to forward as attachment. That way, the attached file will be the original message with the headers included. Typical problems with submitting via email are covered by E-Mail spam submittals blocked by your ISP? and Emailed spam Submissions Disappearing? No Confirmation e-mails?.

If you forward the spam as an attachment, you have to wait for SpamCop to send back a submission reply email which provides a link for you to click on to get to the parser and submit page. If you have spam filtering enabled in your Hotmail or other account, you might have to whitelist emails coming from SpamCop.

If you submit via email and you don't want to wait for the submission reply email to show up in your email account, you can click on "Report Now" above the web form. If you click both "Report Now" and the Tracking URL in the submission reply email for the same submission, you will get "Would send" and "If reported today, reports would be sent to:" messages.

Via the web form:

The web form is typically located at http://www.spamcop.net/, http://members.spamcop.net/, or http://mailsc.spamcop.net/ after you login, depending on the type of account you have.

If you use the web form to copy/paste in the spam message, you need to see ALL of the headers. SpamCop.net - SpamCop FAQ: How do I get my email program to reveal the full, unmodified email? covers how to do that. In addition to that FAQ entry's subsection SpamCop.net - SpamCop FAQ: Hotmail, please note that MSN Hotmail doesn't have a toggle option to let you switch between a normal view and a view showing all the headers. You'll need to go into to your global options to configure your Hotmail account to show ALL headers. However, whether spam or not, you'll then see all the headers for every e-mail that you view. Yahoo! has a per-message toggle that lets you switch between normal and all-header view but Hotmail does not (except as a global option).

If you use the web form, the parsing is immediate and you get the parse page with the option to send your report (which gets sent from an email address composed of the Report ID Number and hostname on the SpamCop.net domain, not from your email address). That eliminates the delay in waiting to get the submission response email from SpamCop (which gets lower priority and may take several minutes to arrive). However, the trade-off is the nuisance of having to copy the headers, paste them, and then copy the body and paste that (and you should be copying the HTML code for an HTML-formatted message, not the rendered version of the spam).

Acknowledgement:

The vast majority of the preceding was written by Vanguard in Re: How do I submit my spam to spamcop?.