How common is retaliation ?

[corvette6769]

How common is retaliation if we leave spam copies intact?

How effective are obscure (munge) spam reports generally?

[Miss Betsy]

When spam reporting first started, spammers sometimes retaliated against reporters. However, IMHO, they don't bother any more. The worst that they do is to add that email address to a 'live' list - usually selling it so that reports are not made against them. in the end, it all evens out. Those who munge don't get less spam than those that don't.

According to some people, unmunged reports are much more effective because a white hat ISP has all the information to track down the culprit and can do it faster. There are reports that some white hat ISPs will ignore munged reports.

In addition, there are so many different ways to put identifiers in an email that it takes hours to take them out and in some cases, materially changes the spam which is against spamcop rules.

IME, which is limited, some spammers do send spam to the addresses that the report comes from. OTOH, I have not noticed an increase in spam on addresses where I have not munged anything.

Reporting does not stop /your/ spam. Reporting may alert those who care to a compromised computer or a spammer who slipped through their defenses. However, most reports to spamcop merely keep that IP address on the blocklist. Evenutally, most ISPs have realized that keeping themselves off blocklists is a GoodThing and hopefully eventually the ones who are not as diligent will also realize it. Then people who are responsible can communicate (even with blocklists in place) without receiving spam. spam will only travel to those who use incompetent ISPs and only those who use greedy ISPs will get their legitimate email blocked.

Miss Betsy

[loafman]

Reporting does not stop /your/ spam.  Reporting may alert those who care to a compromised computer or a spammer who slipped through their defenses.  However, most reports to spamcop merely keep that IP address on the blocklist.  Evenutally, most ISPs have realized that keeping themselves off blocklists is a GoodThing and hopefully eventually the ones who are not as diligent will also realize it.  Then people who are responsible can communicate (even with blocklists in place) without receiving spam.  spam will only travel to those who use incompetent ISPs and only those who use greedy ISPs will get their legitimate email blocked.

When I started reporting almost 5 years ago, there were always threats of retaliation and I munged, however, nowadays there are no threats, and I don't munge. In all this time, the only thing that happened to me, about 3 years ago, was a Joe Job using one of my retired spamtrap names as the From. No problem, just retire the name and reject anything that came to it.

I report hundreds of spams daily from about 40 spamtraps. I get a few to me personally, and a few to webmaster and postmaster. These are all reported, but they are down in the noise compared to some of the spamtraps that get well over 100 per day each. It does help keep the SCBL fed and that's a good thing. The fewer spams that get through, the better we've accomplished our mission.

...Ken

[StevenUnderwood]

I have not munged since about a month after I got my spamcop account (dec 2002) and have seen nothing I can attribute to the practice. I think I may have been added to some lists and removed from others, but the overall numbers have stayed inline with other accounts I monitor (always increasing on both).