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email submission


Gowrie

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Posted

:huh:

When I submit spam by email is that all I do?

I have used the website submission system for years.

I am now having Mailwasher submit spam by email for me.

It appears that I then have to resumit via the links in the reply email or go the website and submit the unreported spam?

In short, does an email submission require follow-up to repost?

Posted

Not sure I follow your "resubmit" and "repost" definitions. If you'd take a few and read through some of the postings over in the e-mail foreum, you'd see that these "confirmation" e-mails cause lots of grief for some, for example, your use of MailWasher only allows one spam submittal at a time, whereas submitting using Outlook Express could allow you to submit multiple spams in one e-mail (but that's another level of issues for some) ... The point is, when you were pasting your spam into the box and hitting the button, the parsing and list of targets for the reports was accomplished then and there. E-mail submittal, the parsing is done, the list is generated, then it's time for you to review and agree that these targets are good. There shouldn't be that much of a difference in the actual flow of things other than the time-shift via the e-mail flow.

Posted
:huh:

When I submit spam by email is that all I do?

I have used the website submission system for years.

I am now having Mailwasher submit spam by email for me.

It appears that I then have to resumit via the links in the reply email or go the website and submit the unreported spam?

In short, does an email submission require follow-up to repost?

...IIUC, the short answer is: yes.

...When you submit spam initially (whether via the web page or via e-mail), you are submitting a request to the SpamCop parser. There is (almost always) a second step -- you must "confirm" that you wish the spam reports to be sent. Please note that this is a very important step -- you are obliged at this point to verify that the e-mail addresses to which the spam reports will be submitted make sense. In particular, you must verify that SpamCop is not going to submit a report to your own ISP or e-mail provider (unless the spam actually came from your own ISP or e-mail provider).

Posted

The advantage to the email submission. you can submit multiple spams which are queued up ready for you to report. In web submission, you cut one spam, paste, review, report and repeat for each spam; in email submission, you select one or more spams, send, and then when they are ready, review, report. It is best to review/report asap after sending; however, you can take a coffee break and then finish up your spam reporting.

Miss Betsy

Posted
The advantage to the email submission. you can submit multiple spams which are queued up ready for you to report.  In web submission, you cut one spam, paste, review, report and repeat for each spam; in email submission, you select one or more spams, send, and then when they are ready, review, report.  It is best to review/report asap after sending; however, you can take a coffee break and then finish up your spam reporting.

Miss Betsy

...Very true!

...Another advantage is that you do not have to open the spam when you report it via e-mail. Some e-mail clients, such as Microsoft Outlook Express and Microsoft Outlook 2003, allow you to view e-mail in plain text but some (such as Microsoft Outlook version 2000 and prior) do not have such a feature (at least, not that I could find). That leaves you vulnerable to all kinds of nefarious spammer tricks.

Posted

Thank you all for your replies.

The conclusion was exactly what I thought; it is regrettable that I had to ask - the help info does not state the obvious, which is that there are 2 steps:

1. Email

2. Review/confirm.

I do suggest that the obvious be put in the help info - I have used Spamcop for years and I was confused - others would be totally confused. I do suspect that many confirmation emails are not being followed up and reported because the recipients do not know that they have to.

I have worked out my own useable system

Mailwasher allows me to identify spam and email it to Spamcop without downloading it from my server and without it going near my legitimate email and most importantly, to bounce it. All email is checked by Mailwasher against the spamcop database automatically and flagged if known.

I am not interested in receiving 50 "confirmation" emails from Spamcop a day and have told mailwasher to delete all these emails from my server without downloading - sorry to trash someone's hard work. I then visit the webpage on a regular basis and submit "unreported" spam.

An option to suppress confirmation emails would be a good - after all we are trying to reduce the volume of unwanted emails.

Posted
and most importantly, to bounce it.

Noooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Very bad idea. Your're just adding to the spam load by bouncing to spoofed 'From:' addresses. Once accepted by a POP sever nothing should ever be 'bounced'.

Posted
The conclusion was exactly what I thought; it is regrettable that I had to ask - the help info does not state the obvious, which is that there are 2 steps:

1. Email

2. Review/confirm.

I do suggest that the obvious be put in the help info

I'd ask where you think this should be placed exactly. Actually more curious as to where you've actually looked that would have suggested that review of the report/complaint targets is not involved (excluding the quick-report thing) ...

I have used Spamcop for years and I was confused - others would be totally confused.  I do suspect that many confirmation emails are not being followed up and reported because the recipients do not know that they have to.

I find this to be confusing. The more normal flow would be for one to try the free-trial first to see if it was something one could use. This would also normally get one started with the paste-it-in-here routine which would have also set up the game plan of submitting your spam and then reviewing the parser output for the verification of the target list. After wading through that for a bit would one then decide to make the money decision.

The e-mail submittal was offered as a time saver/shifter ... thoughts being for example that one could come into work, do the e-mail submittals of spam, then get back to work ... the verification and sending of reports would be available when one got the time to get back to spam handling. Then came the filtered e-mail accounts which has its own set of procedures, depending on how one decides to approach and configure things. But the basic plan is still to submit the spam, review the parser output, and verify the targets before sending the reports. You say confusing, I ask what's the issue?

IMailwasher allows me to identify spam and email it to Spamcop without downloading it from my server

Technically not true. It is downloaded so that Mailwasher can do its thing. That it doesn't end up in your e-mail app's InBox doesn't discount that the e-mail was in fact downloaded.

and without it going near my legitimate email and most importantly, to bounce it.

And this is where the alarm bells all go off, in that this so-called bounce is in now way an actual bounce. That it also is probably going to the wrong address doesn't help matters either.

I am not interested in receiving 50 "confirmation" emails from Spamcop a day and have told mailwasher to delete all these emails from my server without downloading - sorry to trash someone's hard work.  I then visit the webpage on a regular basis and submit "unreported" spam.

An option to suppress confirmation emails would be a good - after all we are trying to reduce the volume of unwanted emails.

Yet, the alarms and complaints raised when these confirmation e-mails are delayed, late, or lost seem to be a never-ending thing.

Posted

I understand the confirmation is important - but it causes me a lot of trouble and lost time.

I get > 100 SPAMs a day. 95% of them are caught by SpamAssassin, but a few aren't. For instance - this morning I had 102 SPAMs detected by SpamAssassin, and 6 which weren't.

Basically, I just forward the ones which SpamAssassin misses. I don't have time to sit and confirm > 100 emails a day, at an average of one minute apiece. So, this morning I forwarded 6 SPAMs and trashed the other 102.

While the email submission is great, I wish there were a way to do it without the confirmation - I would submit a lot more spam.

I wonder how many others don't report their spam because of the time it takes?

Jerry

Posted

Quality is not the question. I only submit spam - not everything which comes in.

But the way the current process works, I don't submit 95% of the spam I receive, either. And not all have been flagged by SpamCop.

Jerry

Posted
Quality is not the question.

<snip>

...Sure it is! As you wrote, above:

I understand the confirmation is important - but it causes me a lot of trouble and lost time.
So you can either go through the "trouble and lost time" of confirming or risk having quality suffer (and also risk reporting your own e-mail provider as the source of spam).
Posted
...Sure it is!  As you wrote, above:So you can either go through the "trouble and lost time" of confirming or risk having quality suffer (and also risk reporting your own e-mail provider as the source of spam).

13658[/snapback]

To quote Col. Potter, "Horse Hockey".

How does spending over 1.5 hours/day mean higher quality? They would be the exact same emails I would submit if I did not have to confirm every one. I'm just not going to waste my time doing it. It doesn't help me at all - SpamAssassin has already handled the messages. It would only help others.

As for reporting my own email provider as a source of spam - only if they were spamming. I'm smart enough to read the headers and tell if someone tried to forge my address or not.

As for my comment - I was referring to the QUALITY of SPAMCOP. That is - accurate reporting of servers. If no one submitted anything, there wouldn't be any servers listed in error. I guess in your book that's good quality. But there wouldn't be anyone blacklisted at all, would there? More (accurate) submissions mean higher quality.

But I don't need to defend myself. I brought up a suggestion which would make it easier to submit spam. You don't like it, fine. That's your choice. I actually don't need SpamCop any more; as I indicated, my SpamAssassin is catching > 95% with no false positives. The SpamCop blacklist only gets about 80-85%.

Jerry

Posted

jstuckle,

not sure what set you off in the defensive mode. If you've got a plan that works for you, great! That you're smart enough to check that you're not reporting yourself, wonderful. However, not everyone is, and the issues continue to this day of folks doing just that.

The original "goal" of SpamCop was that one day, it would no longer be needed. Until then, it's just another tool in the anti-spam (er, high-speed e-mail delivery process <g>) arsenal. No one stated that you had to spend hours a day doing reporting, in fact, you'll find many recommendations for picking an alternative plan ... report the last 10 received, target a specific type of spam, etc .... delete the rest ... this helps to prevent the burn-our and attitude .... but yes, the more reports generated, the more impact they have ...

Posted
As for reporting my own email provider as a source of spam - only if they were spamming. I'm smart enough to read the headers and tell if someone tried to forge my address or not.

Reporting of your own email provider happens many times for reasons beyond your or spamcops control...slow DNS replies, faulty email headers, etc. Forging of your address is usually NOT a causse of this. Search through this forum and the news server for "reported myself" and you should come up with many hits.

The mailhosts system help a great deal in limiting that faulty reporting, but it is not foolproof. Spamcop (parsing and repoting) is a tool for YOU to use to help report spam to it's source. You are making the reports, not spamcop. It is your responsibility that they be accurate.

The chance that nobody will report spam is now very low. Spamcop has averaged over the last 24 hours more than 21 spam messages received per second and almost 2 million total in that 24 hours.

Report what you have time and/or intentions to confirm and trash the rest.

Posted
...Sure it is!  As you wrote, above:So you can either go through the "trouble and lost time" of confirming or risk having quality suffer (and also risk reporting your own e-mail provider as the source of spam).
To quote Col. Potter, "Horse Hockey".

<snip>

...Congratulations, you have become the first member I have placed on my "ignore" list. That will keep me from being tempted to reply to any of your posts, since I won't see them.

...Thank you for letting me know! :) <g>

Posted

I was asked where would I put the information?

This is from http://www.spamcop.net/fom-serve/cache/166.html

How do I submit spam via email?

...

To use the email submission system, just forward as an attachment your spam to the personal reporting address shown on your front page.

If you just forward as an attachment you seem to satisfy the criteria - many would not read further. It not is clear that further action IS REQUIRED. At this point I would say you MUST check the parsing and be satisfied that spam complaints are going to the right people and then report the spam as just forwarding as an attachment does not do this.

I used to manually decipher headings and look up IP addresses and write my own complaint emails to ISPs - I'm over that - I want to report spam and do my bit for the next person but I do not have the time to not have an automated system.

I have never rejected the parsing from Spamcop - it always gets it right. It has certainly never falsely blamed my ISP.

Out of my 120-150 spams a day that get bounced by Mailwasher only 1 or 2 a week get rejected as invalid addresses - hardly an indication that bouncing emails will only bounce to false addresses.

Mailwasher only downloads the header from the server - it does not download the email.

Posted

You are absolutely right that using the word 'just' could imply that there are no further steps. Manual/instruction writing is very difficult. It is not a gift that Julian and deputies have and, for some reason, TPTB don't recruit someone who has that gift. Several people over the years have volunteered to help out, but their offers were never accepted.

Out of my 120-150 spams a day that get bounced by Mailwasher only 1 or 2 a week get rejected as invalid addresses - hardly an indication that bouncing emails will only bounce to false addresses.

Mailwasher only downloads the header from the server - it does not download the email

That only means that 120-148 innocent people are getting a 'bounce' message from you. Mailwasher may only download the header, but Mailwasher can't read the header. It 'bounces' the email (sends another email) to the email address in the return-path which is almost always forged.

There is no program except spamcop (and I believe a freeware program) that can read the headers accurately after the email has been accepted by the server. The headers have to be manually read. Therefore once the email has been accepted the only way to send an email automatically to the 'sender' is to use the forged return-path.

The email can be rejected at the server level back to the real sending server which is how admins use blocklists. If it is a legitimate email, then the sending server sends an email to you based on the code in the rejection.

Sooner or later you will send a 'bounce' message to someone who will report it to your ISP. Bounce messages are even more annoying than spam (especially for those unfortunate small domain owners where the spammer is running through every possible combination of email addresses at that domain). Sometimes they can be overwhelming because they can't be filtered out the way spam can be (How can one tell the difference between a legitimate 'bounce' and one that has been sent to you by someone who doesn't understand how email works?).

Miss Betsy

Posted
You are absolutely right that using the word 'just' could imply that there are no further steps.

While I agree that that instruction could be more specific, if the submitter would read the email reply they got, they would see:

Subject: SpamCop has accepted 1 email for processing

And body:

SpamCop is now ready to process your spam.

Use links to finish spam reporting (members use cookie-login please!):

Along with a link "to finish spam reporting"

Posted

Thanks for typing that up Steven .. I was fighting against pointing out that much too obvious clue ....

I used to manually decipher headings and look up IP addresses and write my own complaint emails to ISPs

I still do this.

but I do not have the time to not have an automated system.

and the time-savings as compared to the above don't allow for the seemingly simple "verify and actually send the report" as compared to the manual mode?

I have never rejected the parsing from Spamcop - it always gets it right. It has certainly never falsely blamed my ISP.

I have found things I didn't like, and many times additional reports will get generated when doing it my way, things like going upstream, hittin gthings that Julian had programmed out due to abuse. And the number of folks reporting themselves is legion, that it has never happened to me or you doesn't invalidate that it happens to others.

bounced by Mailwasher only 1 or 2 a week get rejected as invalid addresses - hardly an indication that bouncing emails will only bounce to false addresses

I believe you have mistakenly defined fake/forged as invalid .... hardly the case. Please peruse the complaints/queries from folks that are on the receiving end of hundreds/thousands of bounces a day because some spammer used their e-mail address in the From: lines of the spew.

Per your comments about facts found at http://www.spamcop.net/fom-serve/cache/166.html ....

many would not read further. It not is clear that further action IS REQUIRED.

I'll argue that if one wants to go look up instructions/definitions/rules but doesn't take the time to actually read all of what's offered, there's not much help in adding even more words to the information page. Here's what I see on the page you referenced;

You should receive an email to your registered email address whenever you submit spam via email. If there are problems, the return email should include errors detailing the problem. Otherwise, you should get a message including links to the reporting system.

I don't see that the reporting action is exactly hidden, but between this "hint" and the content of those e-mails described here, I'm having a hard time agreeing with your stand that the actual reporting action comes as a total surprise that no one could understand. Sorry.

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