Reporting validating email ?

[Realities]

Hello all,

I'm quite new to reporting and I only do it occasionally, but I was wondering... Does anyone think that reporting spam actually validates emails ? For instance, a spammer spams a chunk of 10 emails to a specific IP, then get blocked, thus validating this block of emails, and then go on the next IP with 10 new emails... Obviously, the task is done all at once, but the spammer could verify the blocking status of the IPs.

Would that make sense ?

I'm asking because I was receiving few spam a day, and now that I report all of them I only get more and more...

Thanks in advance,

M-A

[Telarin]

Chances are good if you had done nothing, you would still have continued to get more and more spam. The reason for this, is that once you are on one spammers list, they sell that list to other spammers, so you keep getting on a larger and larger number of lists.

As far as using blocklists to validate emails, I don't think that is a very likely scenario. First off, most spam sending computers are zombies that receive their commands to spam view IRC or other easy to use communication channel. Since these botnets of zombies are constantly changing (some are cleaned up, new ones are infected, etc), it would add a lot of variables to the equation. Plus, you never know if the computer got blocked because of someone reporting your spam, or if there was some other spammer using it at the same time.

Also, usually spammers will try to pump several thousand messages out of each of these zombies in a single run, as can be seen when we get infected people asking questions on the forums here and pull senderbase statistics. It is not uncommon to see daily volumes of 10,000 or even 100,000 emails from these spam spewing zombies.

Add one further variable to this whole mess: You don't know how long it is going to take from the time you send your email, to the time that IP shows up on a blocklist. Might take a few minutes, a few hours, or even several days, so the spammer would have to refrain from using that zombie for several days to be sure he wasn't listed. As we all know, spammers are not patient, and have no comprehension of restraint.

All in all, I think it would be a lot of work, and of very questionable utility for spammers to try using blocklists in this way.

[Realities]

Hello again,

Well! That pretty much answers all my questions

I know I am receiving more and more spam because my emails get exchanged out there. It simply made me think of some sort of "logical" spamming using your features... There is always a way to avoid any type of security.

Thanks a lot for your good and long answer, its very appreciated.

Regards,

M-A