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izian

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and then those providers blame their own users for reporting their servers and getting their servers listed by the SCBL.

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Been there, done that (a couple times) and was spanked appropriately (I should have read the parse closer). For some reason the ISP always seems to think it's your fault, though, even when the report address is way off from what you think would be related to your domain (when report goes upstream, for instance, making it unclear that you're about to report yourself).
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IMHO, part of any SpamCop Reporter's education in use of the Parser should be parsing the IP Addresses of all Mail Servers that are authorized to receive mail for that Reporter (MXs for the domains of the Reporter's email addresses), and all Mail Servers that appear above them (handling mail for the Reporter internal to the Provider), so that the Reporter knows where reports will go if something goes horribly wrong.

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IMHO, part of any SpamCop Reporter's education in use of the Parser should be parsing the IP Addresses of all Mail Servers that are authorized to receive mail for that Reporter (MXs for the domains of the Reporter's email addresses), and all Mail Servers that appear above them (handling mail for the Reporter internal to the Provider), so that the Reporter knows where reports will go if something goes horribly wrong.

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...That would, indeed, be a good thing, but not all of us know what our e-mail provider admins are doing to the MXs. I don't think my employer's network admins, for example, would be happy to have to let me know every time they are going to change or add an IP address, and I'm not going to risk alienating them by asking them! :) <g>
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<snip>I'm not going to risk alienating them by asking them! :) <g>
If the consumer doesn't make it clear what they expect from their internet providers, then it is tyranny!

Miss Betsy

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...For most consumers, this kind of administrivia is way over their heads. They don't much care, either, what their providers do other than what directly affects them. And IMHO it's not reasonable to expect them to know this kind of gory detail about MX admin.

...As for me, I am not a consumer, I am an employee, so I'm going to presume your remark was not directed to those in my situation. :) <g>

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If the consumer doesn't make it clear what they expect from their internet providers, then it is tyranny!

Miss Betsy

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...For most consumers, this kind of administrivia is way over their heads. They don't much care, either, what their providers do other than what directly affects them. And IMHO it's not reasonable to expect them to know this kind of gory detail about MX admin.

...As for me, I am not a consumer, I am an employee, so I'm going to presume your remark was not directed to those in my situation. :) <g>

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For most consumers, you are correct. It takes a few consumers who are aware to make some noise ala Ralph Nader - or even just a Consumer Report type evaluation.

I don't remember your situation. A lot of employees who are the 'front line' responders have their hands tied by management or lack of training. Again, most employees (present company excepted) do whatever is required and do not try to improve communication between customer and management. A few take personal responsibility for knowing the 'gory details' and try to truly help the customer - perhaps not by explaining in detail what has gone wrong, but translating it and passing it on to the appropriate department. I had a conversation with my 'help' desk once about why spamassassin was marking my email to others on the same network as spam. The IP address was on SORBS. The 'help' desk person knew nothing about what that was or what it did, however he listened to my explanation and decided that he would call the IT guys. Within a very short time, there was no problem. From dealing with other 'help' desks, very often the person answering the phone does not take that kind of responsibility, but assumes the customer is doing something wrong (not as arrogant as that sounds since most customers don't know or are making a simple mistake.)

IMHO, nothing will change about the spam situation until ISPs enlist their customers in combatting the problem (and not by 'this is spam' buttons unless those buttons report like the parser and blocklist). Another way to enlist customers is to emphasize that the *sender* is responsible for stopping spam, not the receiver (though good internet habits contribute to less addresses being scraped or collected).

spam is all about money. Spammers spam because they hope to get rich (and some of them do). ISPs allow spammers to operate because they want the money from fees. Other ISPs do nothing about trojanned machines because they don't want to alienate customers and it is expensive to control. And spam control is expensive in other ways also. The backbones don't care either because bandwidth is bandwidth and that's what they are selling. Businesses won't support blocklists because they are afraid of alienating a customer.

Miss Betsy

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IMHO, part of any SpamCop Reporter's education in use of the Parser should be parsing the IP Addresses of all Mail Servers that are authorized to receive mail for that Reporter (MXs for the domains of the Reporter's email addresses), and all Mail Servers that appear above them (handling mail for the Reporter internal to the Provider), so that the Reporter knows where reports will go if something goes horribly wrong.

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Might be worth a new feature request. When setting up mailhosts, after each host is set up, the system shows the reporting addresses that would be associated with each host. For those with few hosts, wouldn't take much to remember those few things. OR, have the parser through a warning if it ever determines that a spam source is associated with one of your mailhosts. (big bold print right by the submit button.)
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Sooner or later you will even get spammed by your (spoofed) self.  Your own IP will never get onto the list through your email address being spoofed. 

30101[/snapback]

Happened to me quite a few times with one of my older addresses for a web-zine I write for.

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Happened to me quite a few times with one of my older addresses for a web-zine I write for.

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What happened? You got spammed by "yourself" (not uncommon)? Or your IP address got on to the SpamCop BL through spoofed email addressing (more to the point through forged IP address and matching IP stack) to reporters/spam traps when the real source was another IP address?

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I'm really suprised people have not sent me nasty-grams over the spoofed addy.

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Hopefully the lack of nasty-grams (love the term) goes to show most admins are sufficiently clued to look past the email address while (I fear) most ordinary users have the majority of spam filtered out, so never saw your spoofed addess. I can't talk, was forced to the same tactic after the first 20,000 or so. And of course the clued-up users, like their admins, can see your email addy is innocent.

Which touches on my hobby-horse for the (extended) moment. I bet if our various legislators had to wade through their own in-boxes for just a day with their filters and block-lists turned off we would be seeing more effective anti-spam legislation coming forward. The 40-50% volume of the total email reperesented by spam of course means a lot of addresses are copping close to 100% (assuming something approaching normal distribution), whether the addressees actually get to see it or not - still an insane burden on the network. Not that legislation is necessarily the answer but if those responsible for public order had any understanding of the extent of the problem it would have to help. If not it would be nice, at least, to have them suffer with the rest of the planet.

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