Webmail held mail reporting fails

[MyNameHere]

This morning, when I use the "Report as spam" link in the Held Mail folder, several things happen that shouldn't:

1. The browser returns to the Inbox with the message that "<n> messages have been reported as spam to SpamCop" and "<n> message(s) have been deleted." Normally, the browser returns to the Held Mail folder and shows it as being empty.

2. When I return to Held Mail, the spams are still there. Normally, they are deleted. (The message said they were deleted, too.)

3. After a while, I get <n> "SpamCop encountered errors" emails, stating that "SpamCop could not find your spam message in this email". This is not due to my fumbling something, because I used the automated reporting link.

This has happened before and has been a transient problem, but it has gone on quite a while this morning.

Can someone look into it?

Thanks!

[Wazoo]

wow, now I know I'm confused .... one poster complaining that nothing is found in the Held Folder - http://forum.spamcop.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=1507 .. another complaining that 'everything' is being placed in the Held Folder - http://forum.spamcop.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=1510 .... and now a Held Folder won't give up any e-mail .....

note sent to both Deputies and JT

[StevenUnderwood]

These are the symptoms I experience, but have never had it happen twice on the same groups of messages.

How many items are you reporting at once? There is a theory I have that this is related to the size of the submission and a timeout inside of webmail. Do you have an unusually large email in that group you are trying to report?

I usually report 10 at a time and rarely have the problem.

[hojusaram]

These error messages happen/occur whenever you use the Spamcop webmail system itself to send / report spam from your held mail. They do not seem to occur if you just do held mail outside of the webmail system itself. Therefore one could assume that there is something wrong with the forwarding of spam mail from within the spamcop webmail system.

You also asked about headers over in Spamcop Help, I send the whole email from spamcop heldmail in the webmail system. Sometimes there are up to 70 held emails or more...I generally go through check possible non spam mail and then clik on all of them and send them at once. To do otherwise would be very time consuming and defeats the purpose of the system.

[MyNameHere]

These are the symptoms I experience, but have never had it happen twice on the same groups of messages.

How many items are you reporting at once?  There is a theory I have that this is related to the size of the submission and a timeout inside of webmail.  Do you have an unusually large email in that group you are trying to report?

I usually report 10 at a time and rarely have the problem.

I was reporting 3 in this case. None of them very large. And they all failed to get through.

I have tried it a number of times this morning with the same set of spam emails. Same results each time.

Yes, in the past, the problem has gone away after a short time.

[StevenUnderwood]

These error messages happen/occur whenever you use the Spamcop webmail system itself to send / report spam from your held mail.

This is false as I report almost 200 every day in this fashion. They do happen intermittently with no diagnosed cause at this time.

I was reporting 3 in this case. None of them very large. And they all failed to get through.

As many as you sent at the one time will fail because they are being submitted in bulk. That you only had 3 and retrying did not help is not good. Can you try to move those messages to a different (new) folder and keep them for JT to look at? Can you try to report them after they have been moved to see if they still fail? You could possibly contact a duputy (deputies<at>spamcop.net) and ask them to forward your problem to JT. I can not remember the email adress to contact him directly.

Perhaps there are instances where the messages themselves cause these problems.

They were not all messages that showed "Invalid Date", "Invalid Sender" and "[No Subject]" were they? These are (in my experience) messages with no body that would not parse anyway.

[MyNameHere]

Perhaps there are instances where the messages themselves cause these problems. 

They were not all messages that showed "Invalid Date", "Invalid Sender" and "[No Subject]" were they?  These are (in my experience) messages with no body that would not parse anyway.

[sigh]

Messages that show "invalid" date, sender, subject quite often have a body. I have called these "defective" spam in previous discussions. The Spamcop reporting system was modified not too many weeks ago so it now parses these just fine. In fact, they are about the only kind of spam I get these days.

The 3 I submitted were defective spam.

But the last time I tried, the parser handled them. (Got the "Quick reporting data" email at 11:48 EDT.)

So the problem (for now) is over. It's clearly something happening on the server that handles the spam submissions differently at different times.

I wish someone had an idea why.

I don't have the spam any more, because that last submission succeeded, but I can keep the report around in case anyone wants to look at it.

[Wazoo]

note sent to both Deputies and JT.

Ellen reports that her pet spammer is busy, busy, busy, and her Held Folder is working just fine. JT reports that nothing out of the ordinary seems to be afoot at his end.

[PeterJ]

The OP's issue sounds the same as the known intermittent issue discussed here:

http://forum.spamcop.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=999

With the exception that when the OP tried to report the 3 spam messages again they still received the errors (which previoulsy no one has experienced...I believe.)

Note that JT is aware of this intermittent issue.

[MyNameHere]

I just wanted to emphasize that when the strange reporting behavior happens, other strange website behavior also occurs, as mentioned in the OP. I don't know if that's a clue, but it might be.

[hojusaram]

sigh sigh Can't someone at spamcop accept the fact there is a problem and do something? How many need to complain in order for Spamcop to fix this problem?

SpamCop encountered errors while saving spam for processing:

SpamCop could not find your spam message in this email:

Received: from vmx1.spamcop.net (sc-smtp1.verio.ironport.com [192.168.12.81])

by sc-app3.verio.ironport.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id D32AC14349

for <ver.hojusaram+spamcop.net-1085056939-199fb894d85289e242d9523d8fbb2925[at]spam.spamcop.net>; Thu, 20 May 2004 05:42:21 -0700 (PDT)

Received: from c60.cesmail.net (216.154.195.49)

by vmx1.spamcop.net with ESMTP; 20 May 2004 05:42:21 -0700

Received: from unknown (192.168.1.40)

by c60.cesmail.net with QMQP; 20 May 2004 08:42:19 -0400

Message-ID: <20040520214219.15qgask8k0sk0wk8[at]webmail.spamcop.net>

Date: Thu, 20 May 2004 21:42:19 +0900

To: ver.hojusaram+spamcop.net-1085056939-199fb894d85289e242d9523d8fbb2925[at]spam.spamcop.net

From: hojusaram[at]spamcop.net

Subject: spam Report from hojusaram[at]spamcop.net

MIME-Version: 1.0

Content-Type: message/rfc822

User-Agent: Internet Messaging Program (IMP) 4.0-cvs

The email which triggered this auto-response had the following headers:

Received: from vmx1.spamcop.net (sc-smtp1.verio.ironport.com [192.168.12.81])

by sc-app3.verio.ironport.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id D32AC14349

for <ver.hojusaram+spamcop.net-1085056939-199fb894d85289e242d9523d8fbb2925[at]spam.spamcop.net>; Thu, 20 May 2004 05:42:21 -0700 (PDT)

Received: from c60.cesmail.net (216.154.195.49)

by vmx1.spamcop.net with ESMTP; 20 May 2004 05:42:21 -0700

Received: from unknown (192.168.1.40)

by c60.cesmail.net with QMQP; 20 May 2004 08:42:19 -0400

Message-ID: <20040520214219.15qgask8k0sk0wk8[at]webmail.spamcop.net>

Date: Thu, 20 May 2004 21:42:19 +0900

To: ver.hojusaram+spamcop.net-1085056939-199fb894d85289e242d9523d8fbb2925[at]spam.spamcop.net

From: hojusaram[at]spamcop.net

Subject: spam Report from hojusaram[at]spamcop.net

MIME-Version: 1.0

Content-Type: message/rfc822

User-Agent: Internet Messaging Program (IMP) 4.0-cvs

[StevenUnderwood]

sigh sigh Can't someone at spamcop accept the fact there is a problem and do something? How many need to complain in order for Spamcop to fix this problem?

There are very few people complaining here about this. I don't follow the newsgroups anymore so I can't say whether it is a hot topic there.

Personally, I have reported ~200 messages per day since you started complaining and have had not one failure. You seem to be a good luck charm for me

Have you tried deleting your first page of messages or do you just keep retrying the same messages over and over? Perhaps there is a message there causing the problem.

[Wazoo]

sigh sigh Can't someone at spamcop accept the fact there is a problem and do something? How many need to complain in order for Spamcop to fix this problem

Yet, on the other hand, when some complain, questions get asked for clarification and/or additional data, the complainant simply ignores all this and continues to post and re-post essentially useless data, it'd be damn hard for anyone to actually get anything accomplished.

For the umpteenth time, what you are posting is "after-the-fact" ... and in order to even take a stab at "your" problem, one would have to see/know what "you" did to actually get to the point of your error problems. I've yet to see that you've gone back to "your" problem Topic, re-started from the beginning and actually tried and advised of the results from all that has transpired over there.

[MyNameHere]

For the umpteenth time, what you are posting is "after-the-fact" ... and in order to even take a stab at "your" problem, one would have to see/know what "you" did to actually get to the point of your error problems.  I've yet to see that you've gone back to "your" problem Topic, re-started from the beginning and actually tried and advised of the results from all that has transpired over there.

Geez, I hope you're not too frustrated.

I'm not sure what you're saying you need.

This particular problem has happened to me on, oh, maybe less than 10 different occasions.

Most of the time, you go back to Held Mail and resubmit the same spams and they go through.

This last time, I resubmitted the same spams maybe 4 or 5 times over a 3-4 hour period, and finally they went through.

And it's all-or-nothing: either all the spams are rejected or all get processed.

So it has nothing to do with a specific spam email message.

I've worked with a Windows (ASPX) server before, and I know there's a log of every web page request. I assume PHP (whatever that is, exactly) also keeps logs. If someone wanted to, I assume they could try to track this down by looking at the logs (but it would be a lot of work and would have to know my IP address, which I'm loathe to post).

Also, I would assume that the SpamCop parser would keep a log of the spams that it thinks have errors.

The only thing I have that might help is a reference to the spam report that finally went through.

On the other hand, this happens so rarely that I don't really care if it's truly harmless (i.e., it isn't a sypmtom of another problem that's eating email or something). It may not be worth anyone's time to locate and fix.

But when the server doesn't return the page I thought I requested, it sure makes

my hair stand on end (what's left of it).

I'm really as concerned about that as I am about the spam reporting issue.

All done.

[Wazoo]

For the umpteenth time, what you are posting is "after-the-fact" ... and in order to even take a stab at "your" problem, one would have to see/know what "you" did to actually get to the point of your error problems.  I've yet to see that you've gone back to "your" problem Topic, re-started from the beginning and actually tried and advised of the results from all that has transpired over there.

Geez, I hope you're not too frustrated.

I'm not sure what you're saying you need.

ummm, what you must have missed was the string above the quote - "QUOTE (hojusaram [at] May 20 2004, 07:55 AM)" There's a bit of history there ...

This particular problem has happened to me on, oh, maybe less than 10 different occasions.

Most of the time, you go back to Held Mail and resubmit the same spams and they go through.

No, I've seen your problem described before. And as you (and Steven) have pointed out, it's that intermittent part of the problem that frustrates the easy solution. At best, there's still the thought that some of this is based on the e-mail side of the system sitting down in Georgia and the reporting system sitting out in California, and matching up all the stuff they each do, in addition to trying to talk to each other .... as you say, there might be log files that contain just the right bit of data, but to snare that set of bits out of how much traffic ...??? grep can do a lot, but it needs the magic phrase to find the right 'gotcha' ... you're right that looking for a specific IP might be a clue, but then we're back to it ony jacks up sometimes <g> ... Just not sure of what's keeping JT busy these days, but that's the main issue at the e-mail server side .. he's a hopping guy <g>