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trevorb

Retired SpamCop Staff
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Everything posted by trevorb

  1. 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
  2. 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
  3. 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.
  4. 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
  5. 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
  6. 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
  7. "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
  8. 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
  9. 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.
  10. 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.
  11. 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
  12. 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
  13. 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
  14. 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
  15. 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
  16. See the new pinned post about this issue. We have a beta server that you can test. Post is here! -Trevor
  17. We are testing out a new popgate for those of you who are having troubles using POP with Hotmail or Yahoo accounts. Use "popgate2.cesmail.net" as your POP server, and your full e-mail address as your username. This is an *extremely* unstable/untested beta server, and you may get multiple copies of your e-mails or all your e-mails may be deleted or any other bad thing you can think of. Please do not use this server if catastrophic failure isn't an acceptable outcome . If you do encounter problems, you can experiment with your account configuration and see if that affects it. In a previous version of this POP software, Hotmail accounts would download the same mail hundreds of times if you had your account set to the "Light" mode, but worked properly in "Full" mode. Report successes and failures on this forum. -Trevor
  18. Yahoo changed their interface over the weekend, and all the tools that allow POPing from Yahoo accounts are affected. We will be testing solutions over the next few days, and hope to have a fix for both this and Hotmail Live accounts soon. -Trevor
  19. I just updated the post with the latest information on browser problems. We are looking for solutions to the mobile browser problems. Right now, reporting spam only works for a few certain mobile devices.
  20. If you e-mail the headers to support[at]spamcop.net we'll look into what's causing the delay. -Trevor
  21. The information in this post refers to the current Webmail system when it was in beta. This information is invalid, and should be ignored. PLEASE READ BELOW FOR INFORMATION ABOUT THE FAULTY MAINTENANCE PAGE As mentioned in the previous post, we are currently testing a new version of webmail. We appreciate your help with testing, and hope to have all the kinks worked out soon. For those of you who have not tried it yet, the new version is available for testing at this address: http://webmailbeta.spamcop.net I am reading all of your problem report e-mails and actively working to fix them. This post will be updated with a list of reported problems/differences and with current solutions. Please continue to submit problem reports by either clicking the "Problem" link at the top of the webmail page, or by sending an e-mail to webmailbeta[at]spamcop.net. The following problems have been confirmed. If no solution is listed below, please ignore them for now. Submitting problem reports for these bugs is no longer necessary. *** CONFIRMED *** * Strange maintenance page at first login (Renames sent-mail to Sept-06, forwards to blank page) * Expired SSL certificate * No "Release and Whitelist" button in e-mail view * "Empty trash" icon and behavior have changed. * Mobile mail displays blank page * Menu bar sometimes spans two lines * Default theme has color problems * Extra "[at]cesmail.net" in problem report page * Search always defaults to Inbox instead of current folder * Keyboard shortcuts have changed since the old version The following problems have been reported but unconfirmed. If you experience any of these problems, please submit problem reports. *** UNCONFIRMED *** * IE7 problem creating new folder with scri_pt blocking enabled * No messages displayed when "Held Mail" is default folder * Netscape V8.0.4 displays incorrect column widths * Address Book works improperly with IE 5 for Mac OS 9 * Ignoring language selection * HTML code visible in message previews sometimes * "Release and Whitelist" not working for held mail * Can't view attachments in-line * Empty entry created when adding new address to blacklist * Can't move filter rules more than one row at a time * Existing mailboxes become "sent mail" folders - "From" field changed to "To" * Daily maintenance operations not being performed * Mail not marked as "read" when reported as spam. * Message header information missing in Safari * "404 Not Found" page when logging in with IE7 * E-mails arriving out of order. Recommended procedures The maintenance page displayed during your first login redirects to a blank page when completed. Please ignore this operation. When sent to the blank page, simply point your browser back to http://webmailbeta.spamcop.net. This is a bug in the webmail system, and we are looking into solutions. Mobile mail now has its own domain. Please direct your mobile browsers to http://mobile.spamcop.net if you wish to use mobile mail. This should always display as a mobile interface, regardless of your browser. Please submit problem reports if you encounter any problems with the new mobile mail system. Since both the new and old versions of webmail share data but use it differently, the first time you login to one after using the other you may encounter problems where you get logged out or redirected to the wrong page. The problem will correct itself after you click around a few pages, but you may need to login multiple times. I recommend that you do not switch back and forth between the old and new versions often. User options have been changed slightly since the old version, and some preferences may have been lost or changed. I recommend that everyone checks all their options and makes sure the settings are still correct. The options have been split into multiple pages, so please make sure you check all of the pages. For instance, the default color scheme setting has been moved to "Global Options." To change it, click "Options" at the top of the page, then select "Global Options" from the drop-down menu in the top right corner. Click "Display Options," and choose your color scheme. Many of the keyboard shortcuts have changed since the old version. Unfortunately we do not have a list of all keybindings, but you can determine the shortcuts on a page by looking at the underlined letter on links, or by hovering your mouse over icons and checkboxes. The warning about a wrong SSL certificate can safely be ignored. That problem will only last for the duration of beta testing. Thanks for your help, Trevor Bentley
  22. This post contains a list of frequently encountered problems with the upgraded Webmail system, and potential solutions. Please read through this post before submitting problem reports. If you have a problem report that is not listed on this page, click the "Problem" button on the Webmail menubar, or send an e-mail to webmailbeta[at]spamcop.net. Problems New Options Layout - Global Options [Renamed 08/17/07] Empty Trash - button missing & changed behavior Held Mail empty at login Menubar - width & formatting Language & translations All mail missing Color scheme - new colors & white-on-white problems Release & Whitelist Mobile mail [Updated 08/17/07] Browser Incompatibilities - Safari, Mozilla, IE 5, Mobile browsers [Added 08/17/07] Images Attached to E-mail[Added 08/21/07] Solutions New Options Layout - Global Options The options menu has been split into multiple pages. When changing your options, make sure you also look at the "Global Options" page, which is selected from the drop-down menu in the top right corner of the Options page. Empty Trash - button missing & changed behavior The "Empty Trash" button can be enabled or disabled. Some users have reported that the button disappeared during the Webmail transition. To turn the button on, click "Options," then "Deleting and Moving Messages," and check the box next to "Display the 'Empty Trash' link in the menubar?" option. Clicking "Empty Trash" moves you to the Trash folder after emptying it, instead of leaving you in your current mailbox. This is a known problem and there is currently no way to change its behavior. Clicking the "Empty Trash" button deletes all mail in the current mailbox. Do not change mailboxes between clicking "Empty Trash" and confirming that you wish to empty the mailbox, or your newly selected mailbox will be deleted. Held Mail empty at login If you previously had selected a folder other than the Inbox as your default folder, you may see no messages in that folder when you first login. The default folder option has been reset, and you must change it in your options for it to work properly again. Click "Options," then "Login Tasks," and set the "View or mailbox to display after login" option to your preferred default folder. Menubar - width & formatting The formatting of the top menubar has changed. It now dynamically resizes to the width of your window instead of scrolling off the screen. There is no way to change this behavior. Some browsers do not display the menubar perfectly. Browsers with known problems are: IE 5 on MacOS 9 Safari on MacOS X If the menubar is too wide, one available solution is to change it to "Text Only" or "Icon Only" mode. Click "Options," select "Global Options" from the drop-down menu in the top right corner, click "Display Options," and change the option labeled "Menu mode." Language & translations Your default language settings may have changed during the upgrade. To select a different language for Webmail: click "Options," select "Global Options" from the drop-down menu in the top right corner, click "Locale and Time," and choose your language from the drop-down menu. All mail missing A few users have encountered a problem where malformed filter rules have been deleting their e-mail. If you notice your e-mail is unexpectedly missing, please check your filter rules for errors. We recommend that you set your filters to move unwanted messages to the Held Mail folder instead of deleting them, so you can verify that no e-mails are being deleted unexpectedly. Another known cause for empty mailboxes is setting your options to display too many messages per page. To view and change this setting, click "Options," then "Mailbox and Folder Display Options," and enter a number into the textbox labeled "Messages per page in the mailbox view." This option should be set to no higher than 200 messages, or your mailbox may display as a blank white page. Color scheme - new colors & white-on-white problems The default color scheme has changed, and the option to set it has moved to a new location. To change your color scheme, click "Options," then select "Global Options" from the drop-down menu in the top right corner, click "Display Options," and choose your color scheme from the drop-down menu. Users with their color scheme set to a mode that no longer exists may have color problems, including white text on a white background. Follow the instructions above to set your color scheme to a valid option. We already manually changed the color scheme for some users. Release & Whitelist The "Release" and "Release & Whitelist" buttons were broken for some users until 10pm EDT on August 13, 2007. Mobile mail Webmail can be accessed through mobile devices in two ways: http://webmail.spamcop.net -- Full webmail for graphical phones with java scri_pt and cookies. http://mobile.spamcop.net -- Simplified low-bandwidth webmail for phones with limited functionality. Currently, the simplified mobile version does not have a way to report spam. Additionally, the full-featured version requires a mobile phone with a browser that supports all the standard java scri_pt 1.5 features. This does not work with many mobile browsers, including Blazer Browser on Palm Treos and on BlackBerrys. We are investigating options for those of you who want the ability to report spam from your mobile devices. Browser Incompatibilities - Safari, Mobile browsers Some browsers have known compatibility problems with the webmail system. Safari for Mac (and all WebKit/KHTML browsers) - The menubar does not wrap properly. It can be hard to view, and causes message headers to shift off the screen. There is no permanent fix available yet, but setting your menu to "icon only" mode helps. Click Options->Global Options (drop-down menu in top right)->Display Options and change your "Menu mode" setting. Firefox and Opera for Mac work correctly. Safari for MacOS 9 - This browser is very old and does not display pages properly. We recommend you use the iCab browser, as it is the only currently updated browser for MacOS 9. Internet Explorer 5 for MacOS and Windows - "Select All" does not work. Mozilla Suite - May have display issues. Upgrade to SeaMonkey or Firefox. Mobile browsers - "Select All" function does not work. Blazer Browser (Palm Treo phones) - Delete, Report as spam, etc. links do not work. Images Attached to E-mail Previously, images attached to e-mails were automatically displayed inlined with the message. If an e-mail was received with very large images attached, the server ran out of RAM attempting to inline the images, and resulted in a blank white page. We have disabled automatic inlining of images, so attached images will now be displayed as links in the e-mail.
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