Statistics

[micktissue]

I'm looking for information of how effective spamcop is at what it does. Does it prevent spam? Does my reporting of spam make any difference and if it does, how much (can it be quantified)?

I'm assuming there is some kind of internal report on this, but general information would be good enough for me.

Thanks.

[Telarin]

This is an age-old question that gets asked every couple of weeks or so, you can browse through old posts and find just about any answer you want ranging from yes it works perfectly to no it doesn't work at all, and everything in between. I will try to keep my answer to the provable facts.

Judging from the number of people that come here because they have been blocked, and work with spamcop and the members to fix the problem so it doesn't occur again, I would say that yes, to some extent spamcop actually stops a small amount of spam at the source. Or at the very least causes trouble for the spammers to they have to find a new spam-friendly ISP like MCI or SBC.

On the other hand, for those of us that use the SCBL to block spam that DID get sent from an ISP, it works wonders. I am the mail server admin for an organization of just over 30 users. Based on the SCBL, I block about 6000 SMTP connections to our server each day. Since they are blocked during the SMTP session at the RCPT-TO stage, this amounts to very real savings in both bandwidth and storage space on the server.

It also account for huge amounts of time saved in not having users sort through literally hundreds of spam messages to find a few real emails.

As far as I know, spamcop does not offer any specific statistics other than what you see on the graphs at the top right of the forum (number of spams submitted, etc).

It would be nice to see the occassional message from an ISP saying they terminated an account based on SC reports, but I don't think we'll ever see anything like that for a number of reasons. The biggest of which is that most ISPs don't notify reporters of their actions.

If you have a spamcop email account, or an ISP that uses the SCBL for filtering, you will get immediate, visible benefits from spamcop. If not, you will probably not see any measurable benefit, as the fight against spam at the source is a very slow one, however, your reporting helps all of us that do use the SCBL for filtering, and I'm sure helps to make the spammers lives more difficult.