Need Advice Please

[Grace]

Hi,

I am trying to figure out how to use SpamCop's reporting service and I was wondering what to do in the case of these porn emails that seem to be daily in my mailbox. I never open them, always delete them immediately but unfortunately not before my children have seen them. I keep my computer in my living room so I can monitor the kids. No one in the house accesses those sites so how is this stuff coming to us?

I tried to send one to spam Cops reporting service and it came back as having errors. Basically, the disgusting picture doesn't show and in it's place were just assorted words. I would paste in what the Auto responder sent me back but it was sooo long.

"SpamCop encountered errors while saving spam for processing:

SpamCop could not find your spam message in this email:"

Any advice you could give me would be greatly appreciated. I run a business off the Internet so blocking most emails also blocks my customers. Thanks.

[Jeff G.]

Please review How do I get my email program to reveal the full, unmodified email? and try again.

If you are still having problems, please post the name of the email software you are using and the methods you have tried to get SpamCop to parse the spam. Thanks!

[Miss Betsy]

Hi,

I am trying to figure out how to use SpamCop's reporting service and I was wondering what to do in the case of these porn emails that seem to be daily in my mailbox. I never open them, always delete them immediately but unfortunately not before my children have seen them. I keep my computer in my living room so I can monitor the kids. No one in the house accesses those sites so how is this stuff coming to us?

I tried to send one to spam Cops reporting service and it came back as having errors. Basically, the disgusting picture doesn't show and in it's place were just assorted words.  I would paste in what the Auto responder sent me back but it was sooo long.

"SpamCop encountered errors while saving spam for processing:

SpamCop could not find your spam message in this email:"

Any advice you could give me would be greatly appreciated. I run a business off the Internet so blocking most emails also blocks my customers. Thanks.

unfortunately not before my children have seen them.

If you want to keep the porn emails from appearing in your normal inbox, what you need is to use a filter to put them in a special folder so that your children don't see them. There are a number of free ones you can download. Perhaps someone will recommend one for you. Or you can make your own using typical words that you don't want your children to see.

It is good to report spam, but it won't stop spam coming to you in the short term unless you use the spamcop blocklist or spamcop email service. Sometimes an ISP will cancel the account (or more often, now, fix the open proxy or compromised machine). But mostly, if you report through spamcop, it puts that IP address on a blocklist which ISP's use to filter out spam. It also filters out innocent emails from that same IP address so businesses have to be careful they don't lose emails from customers. There are what are called "whitelists" so that you can always get email from regular customers. You would need to check the email caught by the filters for new customers. It would be less tedious than it is now, however, because your email has already been pre-sorted into likely spam and likely real email.

The reason that you are getting porn spam is that your email address has been picked up by those who make lists. If you have a website for your business and have your email on the website, there are "spider" programs that look for email addresses to use for spam lists. There are ways to prevent the spiders from finding your email address. There are other ways that spammers collect email addresses.

If you have a business, then you probably don't want to change your email address. Changing your email address is a sure way to eliminate spam as long as you are careful where you use it (and add numbers to the middle to prevent dictionary email collectors).

One business person suggested creating a new email address, but keep the old. Evenutally customers know the new one and nothing but spam comes to the old one. You would have to check both for a long time.

HTH,

Miss Betsy

[WB8TYW]

Hi,

I am trying to figure out how to use SpamCop's reporting service and I was wondering what to do in the case of these porn emails that seem to be daily in my mailbox. I never open them, always delete them immediately but unfortunately not before my children have seen them. Any advice you could give me would be greatly appreciated.

You should be setting your e-mail client not to automatically display the pictures, especially if they are on remote sites.

You can also disable the display of HTML by default where you will only see the plain text part of the message. If you are using a Microsoft based e-mail program and it does not have that feature, then you are at least 1 major CRITICAL SECURITY update from Microsoft for your system.

Allowing your mail program to display the pictures can confirm to the spammer that your ISP is permitting their spam to reach the end users, and can confirm to the spammer that your e-mail address is live. It also identifies to the spammer what mail program or platform you are using so they know if it can be targeted with malware.

Some spammers may think they are getting paid by the number of times that the picture gets displayed.

I run a business off the Internet so blocking most emails also blocks my customers. Thanks.

Yes, but your mail server operator can if they want to block most of the spam that is coming in with out blocking any real e-mails if they choose to. This would also lower their operational costs. You know the ones they have to increase rates to cover.

Almost all of the spam you are getting is coming from computers that have been previously identified to be compromised by a virus or misconfigured to allow the spammers to remote control them. Any mail you get from one of those systems if it is not spam will be a fraudulant order.

Your mail server is probably blocking e-mail from known open relays. Most do.

Most spam is coming from known open proxies, which is a different compromise of a computer. Spammers scan the internet for these computers and use them to sent their spam.

Services like xbl.spamhaus.org and others test computers that have sent spam to see if they are compromised in this manor and publish the results in a list just like the open relay list.

A an open relay that is currently blocked by your ISP mail server has a small chance of sending a real e-mail but it is blocked anyway.

An open proxy has less of a chance of sending a real e-mail than your ISP permanently cutting their rates by 50%.

So there really is no reason why your ISP's mail server should be accepting spam from known open proxies.

Now this will significantly reduce the incoming spam with out any risk of losing real e-mails.

There are also more aggressive blocking lists that list reported spam sources that may not have been confirmed as compromised, and will ocassonally list real mail servers. The bl.spamcop.net list is one of them. These are more useful for tagging potential spam or used with other metrics to determine if it is spam.

While almost all mail server programs already know how to reject known spam sources based on their I.P. address, that capability is not in most e-mail programs that claim to have spam filtering abilities, even though it is far the most accurate way to flag spam.

Trying to filter on content or alleged sender is the least reliable way to screen out spam. It will allow the most spam through, and has a risk of blocking real mails.

The internet has effectively divided between spam friendly I.P. ranges and spam hostile ones. If a real e-mail server ends up on an open relay or open proxy blocking list the owner will get it fixed real fast, or has decided that they want to only have spammers as customers.

-John

Personal Opinion Only

[yourbuddy]

Using K9 (a free program) and the Spamhaus DNS blackhole list

sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org (included in the setup of K9) will solve many

of the problems with spam. It's the best solution I'm aware of.

The Spamcop bl.spamcop.net list is too aggressive for personal

email users, as it can block legitimate email from a customer of a

blacklisted ISP - who may/may not have been listed correctly.

Spamcop says: "This blocking list is somewhat experimental. This

system and most other spam-filtering systems should not be used in

a production environment where legitimate email must be delivered."

[Jeff G.]

Spamcop says: "This blocking list is somewhat experimental. This

system and most other spam-filtering systems should not be used in

a production environment where legitimate email must be delivered."

SpamCop's systems are located in a litigation-friendly environment. That paragraph appears to be designed to deflect litigation.

[yourbuddy]

No further comment needed