Re: Starting to get annoyed.

Posted to spamcop & spamcop.mail;  followups to .mail

Freewheeling wrote:
> I've whitelisted an academic listserve I've subscribed to for four
> months, but Spamcop continues to send its emails to "Held Mail."

 - the spamcop ng is for general SC discussion, as opposed to the ng
spamcop.mail which is for discussing SC mail accounts and problems
 - personally, I don't have any experience with a spamcop mail account,
but I read the faq and the forum and the ng spamcop.mail
 - sometimes listservs are tricky to whitelist.  It is my understanding
that SC checks the headers for Return-Path, From, and Sender for
whitelisted entries
 - there is also a faq page about how the entries work here
http://www.spamcop.net/fom-serve/cache/304.html  Some examples of
whitelist and blacklist matching

> It
> only just started doing this extensively, but has been accepting that
> list email with no problems for months.  What the deuce is the
> problem?

Discussing a problem with heldmail is best done by discussing the
particular SC Xlines which show why it was held.

> I'm also more than a little annoyed by the fact that 75% of my email
> is now spam.  Isn't spamcop supposed to help with this, and why
> aren't they effective?

IMO SC spam reporting very very seldom does anything to prevent future
spam.  The strength of good filtering systems is to prevent spam being
in the inbox and to prevent any goodmail from being in the spam.  Those
of us who advocate reporting may report sources thru' SC so as to
contribute to the SC blocklist to aid in future filtering.  Those who
like to notify spamveriders - spamvertiser providers - would like to
believe that might help squash some websites if a white hat provider
were involved, and that it contributes to the sc-surbl blocklist.

There's not much about the reporting of today's spam which actually
causes the securing of spamsources or the dropping of websites, so the
reporting doesn't actually lead to less spam in the combined inbox and
heldmail -- just an aid in the filtering process if you are using the SC
blocklist as one of your filtering aids.

> I renewed the service recently, but it was
> probably wasted money given the low level of service and the frequent
> problems (such as those misidentified posts to the academic list).

I think it is very very bad if goodmail gets put in with spam.  That
flaw in the configuration [likely] or execution [unlikely] should
certainly be corrected.

> Seriously, how many times do I have to whitelist a sender for it to
> take?  Is anyone at Spamcop awake?

My first guess would be that there is something wrong with the/your
whitelisting configuration.

> If things don't change this will be the last time I re-up with
>   Spamcop. They're just not coming through.

-- 
Mike Easter
kibitzer, not SC admin