trevorb

The 'popgate' functionality is provided by third-party software that attempts to add features to sites like Yahoo that do not support POP. Unfortunately, since it depends on "screen scraping" it is impossible to reach 100% reliability and even the slightest changes on Yahoo's side can break popgate until an update is released. Since 'popgate' will *always* be an experimental feature, if you depend on mail from an account that does not provide POP we recommend you use a different provider or pay extra for POP access. The current status is that hundreds of users are receiving their Yahoo e-mail perfectly, but some users are only getting partial or no success. The Yahoo! webmail settings seem to be important, and many users have found that switching from the "New" to the "Classic" interface or vice versa solves their popgate problems. I installed a big update to popgate2 this morning and it included changes to the Yahoo code. If you have been having trouble with Yahoo, now is a good time to try again. Make sure you open the POP server configuration page in SpamCop Webmail and click the "modify" button to reset any errors and start checking your accounts again. Please let us know if this fixes any issues or introduces any new ones. EDIT: One more note: 'popgate2' can get hung up on an individual e-mail, so if it was working and suddenly stopped working try deleting or moving the top-most message via Yahoo's webmail interface. -Trevor

Support for '%' notation is actually back now. It isn't supported by our mail server software by default and creating custom patches to support it was making it more difficult for us to do security upgrades. However, we found a way to support it without patching the mail servers so it will keep working for the few users who still need it. -Trevor

Also posted on the news page: The percent sign alternative was originally used because buggy old e-mail clients did not support "[at]" in the username field. Modern clients do not have that problem.

Recently spammers have been gaining access to SpamCop e-mail accounts and thousands of messages out through Webmail. These spam runs have caused ISPs to temporarily block and delay messages from us, as many of you have noticed. To limit the influence of these spam runs, yesterday we added a 30 recipient limit to e-mails sent via Webmail -- that is, no one message can be addressed to more than 30 people. If you need to send to more than 30 addresses and cannot break the list into batches of 30, please use a stand-alone e-mail client instead of Webmail. Our inbound (IMAP/POP) server address is 'mail.spamcop.net' and our outbound (SMTP) server address is 'smtp.cesmail.net'. Both servers require authentication. Your username is your full SpamCop e-mail address, including the '[at]spamcop.net' domain. We recommend Thunderbird as a stand-alone client. You will most likely find that it is easier to manage mailing lists offline, and your will have better control over backing up your contact list. Webmail should not be considered a safe storage medium for large contact lists. We are also looking into alternative ways to restrict spammers so we can eventually raise this per-message limit. -Trevor

The triplet is saved for 36 days after the last time a message from that triplet was received. Allowing an entry will allow the e-mail to pass through the next time it is sent, but the message will not be immediately available, for the reason explained after the next question: The messages are blocked at the SMTP server. We don't store them at all. That depends on how the spammer treats bounces. It is likely that some spammers will remove you from their list if they get a greylist bounce. -Trevor

I ran a batch rebuild on everyone's account. Most of the IMAP errors and missing folder problems that were reported are fixed now. So, once again, if you have any troubles with IMAP access after now (3:20pm EDT), send another e-mail off to support[at]spamcop.net. Problem reports sent earlier today will not get a response since there were so many. -Trevor

"Release & Whitelist" is not currently working, but we are working on making it compatible with the new system. If you receive any messages about IMAP failures while using webmail (especially when deleting messages), send an e-mail with the action you attempted, the error message, and your username to trevorb[at]cesmail.net and we'll get it fixed. We had to convert all users over to a new file format, but a few users had special cases and need to be done by hand. *** UPDATE *** "Release" and "Release & Whitelist" should both work again. Let us know if there are any more issues. -Trevor

Webmail is now connecting to new IMAP servers. These new servers should fix a few outstanding bugs with Webmail, and should load large mailboxes much faster. Please report any strange behavior with the Webmail interface to support[at]spamcop.net, or click the "Problem" button on the top menu bar when logged in. Issues that should be fixed: * Message # re-ordering (forum topic 8736) * New messages appearing when "Report as spam" clicked (forum topic 8752) * Some messages not being displayed in mailbox (also forum topic 8752) This upgrade only affects Webmail. If no problems are reported, the external IMAP servers (mail.spamcop.net) will also be upgraded. **** UPDATE **** All IMAP servers have now been updated, including the imap.spamcop.net and mail.spamcop.net servers. Since the old and new servers were not completely compatible, you may notice a few oddities caused by the changeover: * If you get IMAP errors when trying to see the messages in a mailbox, please e-mail support[at]spamcop.net and we will fix it immediately. Your mailbox was open during the swap and needs to be rebuilt. If you want to try to fix it yourself, you can try accessing it from a different program or Webmail and see if that fixes it. * You may have some duplicate messages in your mailboxes. You can just delete them, but if you have an excessive amount you can report it to support[at]spamcop.net. Let us know if you have any other problems with the new servers. **** ANOTHER UPDATE **** I ran a batch rebuild on everyone's account. Most of the IMAP errors and missing folder problems that were reported are fixed now. So, once again, if you have any troubles with IMAP access after now (3:20pm EDT), send another e-mail off to support[at]spamcop.net. Problem reports sent earlier today will not get a response since there were so many. ~Trevor

It is only configurable in the sense that you can turn it on and off. I updated the greylist management pages so they are sorted by from address. That should make it a little easier to find false positives. Only e-mails that you wanted that are listed on the "blocked" page are actually false positives. *All* addresses e-mailing you for the first time will show up on the "pending" page for between 30 minutes and 5 hours. If you find a lot of e-mails that you wanted to receive listed on your "blocked" page, please e-mail me as soon as possible at trevorb[at]cesmail.net (while they are still listed). The idea, again, is that when you receive an e-mail it has a "from" address, a "to" address, and the IP address of the server that sent it. We look at see if the combination from/to/IP has ever been seen before. If it hasn't, we send the ISP that sent it a "temporary failure" message, which tells them to try again in half an hour. If the ISP tries again in >30 minutes and <5 hours, the e-mail is allowed and all future e-mails with that from/to/IP combination are allowed. The "pending" list is those e-mails that have been received once, but haven't been retried yet. The "blocked" list is a list of e-mails that were received once and never retried in the 5 hour window. If they mail you again, they will be greylisted again and the process will start over. The theory is that a lot of spammers send a message, and if it fails they retry constantly for about 5-15 minutes and then they never retry again. "Good" servers, however, usually try once every half hour for days before giving up. Also, the greylist has been updated to use your personal whitelist. If an address is listed in your personal whitelist, it shouldn't be delayed by the greylist anymore.

We added greylist management pages. See the first post in this thread for more information. ~Trevor Moderator Edit: single paragraph content added to this post to remove the need to backtrack a page to locate this new data. ***UPDATE*** We have added management pages so you can view the messages that are pending in your greylist, and the messages that have been permanently blocked in the past 72 hours. Click Options->Spamcop Tools->Manage Greylist - ... to view your greylist entries. From these pages you can manually unblock senders.

For those of you who are interested in this sort of thing, we have some rough statistics captured since we announced the greylist feature: Greylist entries allowed: 44966 Greylist entries waiting for a retry: 1877 Greylist entries rejected: 57362 Users with greylisting enabled: 270 Approximately 56% of incoming mail to those 270 account is being rejected as spam. We have been working on an addition that lets the whitelisted e-mail addresses by without greylisting them. It is entering beta testing now (behind the scenes), and we will roll it out in a couple of days. ~Trevor

There are two major types of SpamCop users: 1) Those who want to see every mail coming in, decide if it is spam or not, and report the spam by hand 2) Those who just want little spam with no input on their side SpamCop has traditionally focused on the first group, which is why spam is always allowed in and stored in your Held Mail folder. It is not reported until you actually click the "report as spam" button or forward it to a spam reporting address. Recently, many of our users have been requesting a way to just *block* spam. Greylisting is the first of those methods that we are going to implement. The spam is not reported and doesn't help get spammers shut down or blacklisted... the mail just vanishes. Any system that makes the decision to delete spam without human interaction (i.e. what group 2 wants) *will* result in a tiny percentage of good mail being lost. That is why we have always focused on group 1. But demand is high enough now that we are offering this service to people who want to reduce their spam, and can survive losing a very small amount of good e-mail. A page to monitor your own greylist entries was considered, and is still on the list of potential improvements. We decided to roll it out now to see how well it works, but a way to manage your own greylist and view statistics is planned. Currently, the greylist does not consider your SpamCop whitelist. Even addresses on your whitelist will be delayed the first time they are received. -Trevor

To clarify how greylisting affects you based on how you read your e-mail: If you are using our system to POP mail from your ISP (i.e. move it from your ISP to your Spamcop account), greylisting will do nothing. If you are using POP to download e-mail from Spamcop (i.e. move it from your Spamcop account to your ISP or home machine), greylisting *will* work. Greylisting also works if you are using IMAP to read your e-mail without removing it from the servers, either by using Webmail or your own e-mail client. Greylisting only benefits you by blocking spam originally sent to your Spamcop account. If the spam was sent to another e-mail account originally and redirected to your Spamcop account (either through ISP forwarding or POP), greylisting does nothing for you. -Trevor

Any mail that is POPed by our servers does not get greylisted. Enabling greylisting shouldn't affect it. If you *forward* e-mail to your Spamcop account from another service, it *will* be greylisted, but it will also always be allowed through whether it is spam or not since your ISP is relaying it. If the majority of your mail is forwarded to your Spamcop account, enabling greylisting is probably more harmful than helpful. -Trevor

We have just added a new spam-blocking feature called greylisting to our mailgates. When enabled, greylisting delays messages from unseen e-mail addresses for a short time (configured to 30 minutes right now). Messages from addresses that have been seen before are allowed through immediately. "Good" mail relays, like your friendly neighborhood ISP, are set to automatically retry delayed messages periodically, so all of your good e-mail will still get through. Spammers, however, often use relays that don't automatically retry, so a lot of spam will simply never be delivered. This is all transparent to both you and the people e-mailing you, and the only side effect is a short delay the first time someone e-mails you. Our testing over the last few days has shown as much as 75% of spam to a specific e-mail address being rejected by the greylist before it ever hits our spam filters. spam blocked by the greylist is not delivered at all, and will not show up in your Held Mail folder. More information about greylisting is available at greylisting.org. We have done some testing and the results have been very positive, but obviously results are not always the same when escalated from a few accounts to thousands. This feature should be considered "beta" for now. To enable greylisting on your account: 1) Login to webmail 2) Click "Options" on the top menu bar 3) Click "Spamcop Tools" 4) Click "Manage your email forwarding, password, mail report, and greylist settings. " 5) Click the "Enable greylisting" checkbox, and press Submit Please use this forum to discuss your results. We are interested in hearing about how well this feature works for you. If you encounter any problems, send an e-mail to support[at]spamcop.net. ***UPDATE*** We have added management pages so you can view the messages that are pending in your greylist, and the messages that have been permanently blocked in the past 72 hours. Click Options->Spamcop Tools->Manage Greylist - ... to view your greylist entries. From these pages you can manually unblock senders. ~Trevor