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Long-time user boycotts SpamCop


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I've been filing SpamCop reports for years, but there seems no point now that SpamCop fails to look up the spam-vertised sites mentioned in unsolicited email even though these servers are live, their IP addresses easily ID'd through a traceroute, and the URLs have not been obfuscated.

From my experience, this has been happening to 70% of the spam reports I file (three in a row just now). Sometimes cancelling a report and filing it again prods the system into looking up the site and notifying its host, but this do-it-again workaround seems to be failing, too. This has been happening for the past month.

What's the point of cutting and pasting headers and message text if SpamCop has decided to let hosts off the hook?

Michael Linder

KNX Newsradio, Los Angeles

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This topic has been covered numerous times, and has received numerous answers. Reporting of spamvertised websites is NOT the main focus of spamcop, and is thus not where the majority of the resources are focused.

You have provided no data at all to work with, so all I will be able to give you is general vague answers.

The reason this usually happens is problems with the DNS servers. While your browser will happily wait 20 or 30 seconds for a servers name to resolve, spamcop simply handles too many messages to wait this long for name resolution. If the DNS server is not working well, spamcop simply gives up on name resolution and proceeds with its main focus of reporting the spam to its source ISP. This is why refreshing sometimes works, as the name servers may respond more quickly one time than they do another.

It is also possible that if the spammer controls the DNS server in question, they can actually block lookups coming from spamcop IPs altoghether.

There really is no simple way that spamcop can solve this problem, as they do not have control over the DNS servers that are causing the problem. The only way around the first scenario would be to increase the wait time, which would slow the already slow processing of spam even further. As far as the second scenario, spamcop could route through open proxies for the DNS queries, but that puts it on the same level as the spammers abusing open proxies. Either of these solutions would require considerable time and resources for something that is considered an "extra" feature by spamcop and not their main focus.

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simple solution: Refresh your browser or manually enter the reporting address in the "User Defined Recipient" field.

Nothing is perfect and with the volume that SpamCop deals in, I'd say it's doing a damn fine job.

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