average reporting time

[zaynit]

Hi,

Spamcop's definition of average reporting time is:

"This speed is calculated by comparing the time that the spam is received at the recipient mailserver with the time at which it is submitted as spam to SpamCop."

I forward the spam I receive to Spamcop within hours of receiving it and gradually see my average reporting time decreasing. The present figure is less than 4 days, but this has absolutely nothing to do with my personal reporting time. My average reporting time is half a day, one day at the most. When I started using Spamcop a few months ago, the average reporting time was supposedly 28 days or something like that. I'm sure Spamcop is measuring something, but it's not what the definition says it measures. Can anyone explain what is being measured?

[Jeff G.]

Sorry, I haven't seen a more detailed explanation. If I were you, I wouldn't worry about it.

[Lyn]

I was curious about this too. For a long time my average reporting time was 7 hours. Now it is 7 days, so I figured that someone just made a minor error somewhere.

Not exactly earth shattering, but a bit startling when it first changed a month or so ago.

[Wazoo]

If it's any help, it's never been correct for my reporting. Newsgroups also include lots of folks complaining that the submittal of a single spam added as much as several days to their "average", and as anything over 3 days is not reportable, it makes little sense to have their average jump from several hours to a number of days ... so the question has always been since its appearance, what the heck is it measuring that doesn't seem to jive with the actual reporting experience of some folks, yet other have no issue ??? Personally, I just consider it as non-essential stuff taking up screen space, though I'll guess that thoughts behind it were to possibly get more reports sent quickly to aid in the "quick-reaction" process ..but, as the reported averages have jumped around so much for so many, I don't think it's accomplished that goal ...

[Spambo]

Your email account essentially receives the spam at the time your mail server accepts it. This doesn't mean that the spam was immediately available to you or that you downloaded the spam as soon as your mail server received it. Obviously SpamCop cannot know what time you downloaded the spam since that information isn't recorded in the spam's headers.

That being said, the average reporting time is kind of a worthless statistic. It is is largely dependant on the destination mail server being RFC compliant and having its clock (including date & Time Zone) set accurately.

IMO its only purpose is to encourage people to report their spam promptly. Depending on factors beyond the control of most users some will try to keep their times low and others will try to improve their times by reporting their spam quickly. Either way SC benefits from the faster reporting since the SCBL works better when very fresh spam is reported.