Auto-responder Spam: SpamCop mail doesn't detect

[Carlton Bale]

I'm getting a bunch (200/hour) of autoresponder spam, so I signed-up for a SpamCop e-mail account to help me deal with it. I've read the "Why auto responders are bad" article and understand the situation.

The problem is that these autoresponders are not being detected as spam or filtered from my spamcop.net account. One step would be to setup a filter for all senders that contain "Mailer Daemon", "postmaster", "mail delivery system", "mail delivery subsystem", etc. However, I assumed that since the original messages did not originate from my server, it would automatically be detected as spam.

What is the best way to deal with this auto-responder spam? Is there a better method than Manual filtering?

[Telarin]

In order for spamcop to detect them as spam, spamcop users would have to have reported them enough times to trigger the "spam" threshhold for the source IP address, which doesn't happen very often with auto-responders.

A better solution to them is as you said to create a few manual filters based off the message subject. If using the spamcop mail service, you could have it put any messages meeting your criteria in your heldmail folder and report from there.

[Jeff G.]

Beware of Filtering and then Reporting solicited bounce messages (that is, bounce messages in response to email you actually sent), which shouldn't be Reported using SpamCop.

[Carlton Bale]

Thanks for the tips. I've isolated the one e-mail address I'm currently using to send mail, to prevent real bonces from being forwarded to my spamcop account. So no legitimate auto-responders are going to SpamCop.

I've filtered as much as I could on my own server before sending to my spamcop e-mail, so mostly just spam is sent to my spamcop e-maill. The account makes reporting much faster than forwarding messages via Thumderbird, so that alone made it worth the annual fee.