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Reporting problems today?


mrmaxx

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Just managed to report the 26 spams I received last night, (Sydney, Australia, UTC+1000), between Midnight and 1:00am.

All went through OK.

No more spam since 1:00am last night.

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Wow I can't believe how snarky people can be when a tool gets broken. ALL websites get broken at some point. Even if we don't know about it. Amazon, yahoo, hotmail, facebook, assorted banks ALL have been hacked at some point. The test is how well and how fast it gets fixed.

I can only guess this issue has left a few admins ripping out their hair for weeks.

But....

For the first time in days I just reported my 20 or so daily pieces of crap. YEA! It's working again.

(frantically looks for wood to knock.) I would much rather grab each and every spammer tightly by the balls with some old rusty pliers, but in leu of that ability, spamcop reports are the next best thing.

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About the Cisco announcement on the SpamCop login page:

I wonder if Cisco is telling the truth about what is happening?

I find it really difficult to believe that they would treat SpamCop users in this way!

I also note that Don's messages in this thread have given very little information

about the true cause of this problem, and say very little else, except that they

are working on it.

IIRC, one of Don's messages said something along the lines that it would be imprudent

to state publicly what the root cause of the problem is. (I may be wrong, but I don't

have time to trawl through the 500+ messages in this thread, in order to find it).

I am therefore wondering if the announcement from Cisco might not really be meant

as some kind of disinformation for the SpamScum?

Just a thought, valued at about 2 cents, as far as I can see! :D

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No joy again. The first one of the 10 messages I sent in via email this morning received this:

Gateway Timeout

The proxy server did not receive a timely response from the upstream server.

Reference #1.6d154b8.1342048642.3bad163

This was at 16:20 PDT, started at 16:17 PDT. Mail was sent at 10:57 PDT, reply received 12:45 PDT.

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Wow I can't believe how snarky people can be when a tool gets broken. ALL websites get broken at some point. Even if we don't know about it. Amazon, yahoo, hotmail, facebook, assorted banks ALL have been hacked at some point. The test is how well and how fast it gets fixed.

I can only guess this issue has left a few admins ripping out their hair for weeks.

But....

For the first time in days I just reported my 20 or so daily pieces of crap. YEA! It's working again.

(frantically looks for wood to knock.) I would much rather grab each and every spammer tightly by the balls with some old rusty pliers, but in leu of that ability, spamcop reports are the next best thing.

If a tool breaks, a "we're working on it" usually suffices. After a few more days, some more details or an ETA are usually helpful. Sometimes that isn't possible, but an update at least shows the issue is still of importance and actively considered a problem.

After WEEKS, though, with no official statement except the one from Cisco on the reporting page (which, as I've mentioned previously, *seems* to suggest the performance issue is actually being actively caused by decisions Cisco is making with regard to Spamcop.net) is enough to request a more detailed response, and to express displeasure with the lack thereof.

Time is not free. Some people have literally put days of their time and effort into Spamcop and the SCBL, and the community has a certain expectation of respect with regards to this effort. In return, we they have trusted Cisco as a shepherd of their donated time and effort.

Others have chosen to purchase fuel, essentially to invest in sc itself. They've done this despite sc now being owned by a huge enterprise, again, one assumes as a show of support for sc and the role it plays.

So, for the service to have issues for what is quickly approaching one month, and the only official response being "We know, we're using it to make our system better", it's not wrong, in my mind, for people to complain that their gift of time and effort (or, their dollars traded as "fuel") are being squandered, possibly in the name of corporate profit and closed-source, nonpublic solutions.

*If* that is indeed what has happened here, I think the volunteers who have put their effort into reporting promptly to sc, and who have voiced frustration in this thread, have all the reason in the world to complain, and to demand answers.

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<snip>

IIRC, one of Don's messages said something along the lines that it would be imprudent

to state publicly what the root cause of the problem is. (I may be wrong, but I don't

have time to trawl through the 500+ messages in this thread, in order to find it).

<snip>

...There's a trick to that, I found! If you go to any of Don's posts and click on his user ID (SpamCopAdmin), which is a link, it will take you to a page that shows his SpamCop Forum Profile. That page also has what appears to be a drop-down list labeled "Profile Options" near the top right; click that and one of the options is "Find Member's Posts" -- click that and a search results page will be displayed with all his posts, displayed with most recent at the top and in reverse chronological order. Scan until you find the one you want.

...Now that I've described the trick for future reference, the message to which I believe you are referring is this one.

<snip>

Time is not free. Some people have literally put days of their time and effort into Spamcop and the SCBL, and the community has a certain expectation of respect with regards to this effort. In return, we they have trusted Cisco as a shepherd of their donated time and effort.

<snip>

*If* that is indeed what has happened here, I think the volunteers who have put their effort into reporting promptly to sc, and who have voiced frustration in this thread, have all the reason in the world to complain, and to demand answers.

...Well, that seems to be a "glass is half full" philosophy and not totally indefensible. Others of us prefer to relax and take advantage of the lull in the availability of SpamCop reporting to do other things. We know that our earlier efforts at reporting spam have helped contribute to the SCBL and we will either continue trying to report during the problem or, having better things to do with our time and/ or to avoid frustration, choose to wait until the problem is known to have been permanently fixed. At this point, trying to report and feeling frustrated and angry that one's trust has been violated seems a bit masochistic. But I guess that's just me (and ArtmakersWorlds and Chris Souter and a few others). :) <g>
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I've had that issue for 2 days now.

Three days now, and I still can't submit spam, account still disabled.

I imagine that all my previously submitted spams are now stale, and can't be reported.

If I could get re-enabled I'd try to submit spam again.

:(

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...Well, that seems to be a "glass is half full" philosophy and not totally indefensible. Others of us prefer to relax and take advantage of the lull in the availability of SpamCop reporting to do other things. We know that our earlier efforts at reporting spam have helped contribute to the SCBL and we will either continue trying to report during the problem or, having better things to do with our time and/ or to avoid frustration, choose to wait until the problem is known to have been permanently fixed. At this point, trying to report and feeling frustrated and angry that one's trust has been violated seems a bit masochistic. But I guess that's just me (and ArtmakersWorlds and Chris Souter and a few others). :) <g>

To be clear, I don't consider an outage to be a "violation of trust". They happen. I should know, outages fall right in my lap in my day job, as they have now for a decade.

*however*, if Cisco has made the *choice* to degrade the performance of sc in order to utilize sc resources within their iron port product (which is how I read their comment on the reporting page), then that *is* a breach of trust, unless I am the only one who would take issue with Cisco saying "Attention, we may arbitrarily degrade the performance of sc (and, presumably, the SCBL) to further our own corporate interests". I personally find that position, if accurate, to be something worth raising debate over, myself.

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Wow I can't believe how snarky people can be when a tool gets broken. ALL websites get broken at some point. Even if we don't know about it. Amazon, yahoo, hotmail, facebook, assorted banks ALL have been hacked at some point. The test is how well and how fast it gets fixed.

I can only guess this issue has left a few admins ripping out their hair for weeks.

But....

For the first time in days I just reported my 20 or so daily pieces of crap. YEA! It's working again.

(frantically looks for wood to knock.) I would much rather grab each and every spammer tightly by the balls with some old rusty pliers, but in leu of that ability, spamcop reports are the next best thing.

Website my have problems. It is the time it is taking to get fixed which is the real problem.

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<snip>

*however*, if Cisco has made the *choice* to degrade the performance of sc in order to utilize sc resources within their iron port product (which is how I read their comment on the reporting page), then that *is* a breach of trust, unless I am the only one who would take issue with Cisco saying "Attention, we may arbitrarily degrade the performance of sc (and, presumably, the SCBL) to further our own corporate interests". I personally find that position, if accurate, to be something worth raising debate over, myself.

...Yes, I accept that. However, at this point, I consider that to be unsupported supposition as we haven't had any authoritative confirmation. And, even if true, our contributions to the service are voluntary, so we've lost little while having contributed to a process which (when it works) makes things at least a little harder for spammers. The service degradation is easily avoided and its unavailability inconveniences us little unless we volitionally try to report spam, which we do with the foreknowledge that the service may not be responsive.

<snip>It is the time it is taking to get fixed which is the real problem.
...Not to me. And it seems that before one makes such a statement that there needs to be a yardstick against which to measure whether it's a problem -- but there is no reasonable yardstick, because none of us here has any more than the foggiest suppositions as to what the problem is that needs to be solved.
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What's that skippy? Spammers' have blacklisted me. There's no spam, no held mail, nothing whatsoever to report. No war this Thursday. O.o

I'm pleased with the service provided to me over the years and in that time I've learned to wait for the inevitable outages to pass however long they may be and to expect that I will end up with spam which is past it's report by date every so often for some reason or other.

This outage may be exceptional, but my experience of spamcop to date is that it's more grand old duke of york than humpty dumpty.

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From the home page of www.spamcop.net:

"We are pleased to report that at the time of writing, the SpamCop service is fully operational. "

Really?!? Who fact-checks this stuff? Four weeks of gear grinding. For the past couple of hours I haven't been able to get anything but a Gateway Timeout or sigalarm. But SpamCop is fully operational. As compared to what, the Hindenburg?

I've spent more time in the past month unsuccessfully trying to report a few dozen emails than I did the entire preceding year reporting 15-20 times that. And the best they can do is describe the service as fully operational.

Anyone sense that this has become a bit frustrating for this user? Yeah, me neither.

Move along folks, there's nothing to see here.

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Strange I don't see that. All I see is:

Scheduled Service Outage The SpamCop.net Reporting Service is scheduled to be offline and unavailable for approximately two (2) hours beginning at 10:00 p.m. PDT on Wednesday July 11, 2012. The reason for the outage is to perform database maintenance to help relieve some of the operational issues currently being exerienced by our users. The SpamCop.net website, including spamcop.net, www.spamcop.net, members.spamcop.net and mailsc.spamcop.net will be down during the upgrade. Emailed spam submissions will continue to be accepted but will not be processed during the downtime. Once the service is brought back online you can expect a delay of several hours as the backlog of spam is processed. The SpamCop mail service, newgroups and forums is not affected by this scheduled outage and will continue to be available throughout the upgrade. Thank you in advance for your patience Operational Issues: Over the past week Cisco has been actively investigating increased spam volumes as a result of increased botnet activity. The results of this investigation have allowed Cisco to improve on the industry-leading anti-spam solution to our customers. SpamCop.net is instrumental in collecting message samples for our ongoing investigation, and as a result some SpamCop.net users looking to submit their spam samples have experienced delays with the service. We apologize for these intermittent delays and will do everything possible to minimize these as our investigation continues. We are pleased to report that at the time of writing, the SpamCop service is fully operational. Delayed bounces, virus notices, vacation messages - More.. Warning: There has been a large increase in phishing attempts with all webmail services, including SpamCop. We remind all users that we will never send out a request for personal or account information, will never send an email with a zip or executable attachment or send you a link to a zip or executable file. More recently this has changed to emails with a forged spamcop".com" return address threatening blacklisting. Again, SpamCop.net never sends threatening emails. These emails are phishing attempts trying to get you to go to a malware downloader site.
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Strange I don't see that.

<snip>

...Stranger, yet -- I see both messages -- Peter's (Ex_Brit) first, followed by a long paragraph at the end of which appears the sentence to which tfm3 81864[/snapback] alludes! I would say that their leaving the latter there was an oversight!
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No joy again. The first one of the 10 messages I sent in via email this morning received this:

Gateway Timeout

The proxy server did not receive a timely response from the upstream server.

Reference #1.6d154b8.1342048642.3bad163

This was at 16:20 PDT, started at 16:17 PDT. Mail was sent at 10:57 PDT, reply received 12:45 PDT.

I just finished reporting all 10 messages about 5 minutes ago, 17:27 PDT. They went quickly, but I did notice some oddities. A few of the report screens did not show the age of the spam message as usual. Something is still amiss, even though it appears to be working more smoothly at present. I just sent in three more spam messages and hope to report them RSN.

Edit: It only took a few moments to get the reply back for the latest three spam messages and they reported quickly with the links given. Maybe we are over the hump with the problems and the SPAMCop techs have identified the issue as implied by the main page describing the down time tonight. Or, is it just shotgunning and hoping it fixes the issue? We'll see.

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What's that skippy? Spammers' have blacklisted me. There's no spam, no held mail, nothing whatsoever to report. No war this Thursday. O.o

<snip>

...Same here! They must all be busy attacking the SpamCop server! :) <g>
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Strange I don't see that. All I see is:

I just checked in and saw a similar announcement:

The SpamCop.net Reporting Service is scheduled to be offline and unavailablefor approximately two (2) hours

beginning at 10:00 p.m. PDT on Wednesday July 11, 2012. The reason for the outage is to perform database maintenance to

help relieve some of the operational issues currently being exerienced by our users.

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Wow, from the comments here it really seems that the rats really are abandoning the ship.

<Bully Pulpit Mode>

But before you jump ship, think of this:

I've been quietly supporting SpamCop (by submitting spam) for over 10 years. In those ten years I have only benefited from SpamCop purely as a side effect of their work. But those benefits have been clear. I saw spams drop from a 300+ a day high when I was reporting spams BY HAND, using reverse look-ups, trying to avoid being tricked by false headers, tracking down ISP's and bandwidth providers, eventually down to a manageable 10 to 15 a day after being recommended SpamCop by an ISP's SysAdmin.

Even after I migrated to Gmail (which is no slouch on spam), I have STILL seen drops in spam when I report them.

Those are very concrete benefits, even though neither I nor any of my service providers have directly used SpamCop's email or BlackHole List to my knowledge.

There have ups and downs in those years, but SpamCop has always come back.

And SpamCop has survived where many other anti-spam companies have fallen to Hack-Attacks, DOS attacks, etc.

Regardless of whether Cisco is in denial, or major spin-mode, now is not the time to abandon her. Now is the time to return the favor she's done for us by making our email accounts usable, by standing ready to provide her with the ammunition she'll need once she's overcome these latest attacks.

Who CARES if Cisco is "using us"? We, both paying and non-paying members, benefit from being used so!

Do you think I would have stuck around for more than 10 years if I DIDN'T benefit? No way! I'm not that charitable.

Even with the extra effort of using Gmail's "View Original", cutting and pasting, opening and closing windows, it's been worth my while. And it's been worth yours too.

Besides. SpamCop is one of the oldest anti-spam efforts still around, and I believe the most successful. That is exactly why there is a concerted effort by the spammers and hackers-for-sale now, because it has been so successful.

If Cisco's/SpamCop's reporting base abandons it, THAT will be the death of SpamCop. Not some petty bot-net attack.

And if SpamCop goes, there goes one of the cornerstones of a safe and usable Internet.

Which would be bad for all of us.

</Bully Pulpit Mode>

jims

P.S.

Besides, if the Internet can't police it'self, that is just more ammunition for those who don't wan't a free internet, for those who want to regulate it to death, to spy on it, on YOU, and those who wan't to push all but commercial activity, including free individual speech, off the net.

Come on, the Internet became the Internet because of people of good-faith and good-intentions working together to create an online community. A community with agreed upon rules, and a community where individuals did their bit to enforce those rules. Not one where people depend on others to make things better, but worked on it themselves. Has all of that vanished? Surely not.

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<snip>

<Bully Pulpit Mode>

...As much as I appreciate your "bully pulpit" comments and morally support SpamCop, myself, I fear you may be romanticizing just a bit. :) <g> After all, many people have reported getting more spam after starting to use SpamCop while others, like you, have reported less. I can't help but feel that, just as most of the "more spam" contingent were engaging in post-hoc thinking, so may you be. My guess is that the fall in spam may be more likely the result of other factors, such as e-mail providers becoming much more savvy as time goes on in keeping spam out of their users' inboxes (parenthetically, sometimes with the unhappy and unnoticed result of also keeping *valid* e-mail out!).
<snip>

Do you think I would have stuck around for more than 10 years if I DIDN'T benefit? No way! I'm not that charitable.

<snip>

...While I don't benefit directly in terms of short-term reduction in spam, I am hopeful that reporting spam to abuse addresses, feeding the SCBL so that others can directly benefit and using SpamCop's facility to also send complaints to authorities such as Knujon and the FTC have resulted in direct or indirect pressure on spammers and therefore indirectly benefit me.
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First Spamcop is NOT in operation and it is well before 10:00 PDT.

Second, the amount of time it has taken for Spamcop to address this issue and fix this problem is totally unacceptable. Cisco has a huge amount of resources to draw on. Where are they?

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First Spamcop is NOT in operation and it is well before 10:00 PDT.
...And therefore...?
Second, the amount of time it has taken for Spamcop to address this issue and fix this problem is totally unacceptable. Cisco has a huge amount of resources to draw on. Where are they?
...And the consequences of the issue not being fixed are....? One constant rule of computer-related issues is that a problem that takes 1000 hours for one person to solve does not necessarily take only an hour for 1000 people to solve. Especially when the problem is intermittent and the actual root cause has not been discovered.

...The sky is not falling. The earth still rotates around the sun. I trust that, like me, you are just as healthy and happy with all other aspects of your life today as you were before the SpamCop problems started (or, at least, any deterioration can not be traced to the SpamCop parser being unreliable). I know that it is sometimes tempting to let one's world revolve around relatively unimportant things but sometimes getting worked into a lather just isn't worth it. Take this opportunity to spend more time doing those other things that you would otherwise spend on reporting spam! :) <g>

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