Re: Spamcop Web Service?

Anonymous wrote:
> Neo Geshel wrote...
> >
> > Is there a web service that I can connect to in terms of spam reporting?
> > What about spam submission? If there is nothing now, will there be one
> > made available in the future?
> >
> > I am looking to roll my own implementation of the “report spam” pages,
> > to make them much more performance-orientated and cut out features that
> > I have no need nor interest for. Additionally, I would love to implement
> > it as an AJAX app on my own server.
> >
> > The problem is, the only way of reliably doing it without a web service
> > is via screen-scraping, which breaks every time a significant change to
> > the reporting process is implemented. I would rather not do it via
> > screen scraping, so I am curious if a web service is or will be
> > available for members.
> 
> I am just a user, not an admin, but I would guess that Spamcop wishes
> to retain full control of what gets reported and what the reporter sees
> while doing it, and that avoiding false reports is a lot more important
> than "performance" (which I assume means "report many spams very
> quickly").
> 
> I went through the same thinking at first, because I get a lot of spam
> and no (almost no?) ham on one address and would like to bulk-report
> it, but I came to realize that spamcop has spamtraps that do exactly
> that without the risk of a false report that I would be causing if I bulk
> reported or even sped up my reporting and spent less time eying each
> spam.  I decided that the best way for me to contribute my effort is to
> report the very freshest spam that I see, and to take the time to verify
> that every report I send is a report of real spam.  I think Spamcop
> needs quality  a lot more than it needs quantity; they can get more
> spam any time they wish by setting up more spamtraps.
> 

The point is, I do all of my spam “submission” through a program called 
MailWasher. That is the easy part. However, the next step is to visit 
the site and click on the “unreported spam saved” link. I catch spam 
through about 20 separate e-mail accounts, which can amount to a rather 
large amount of spam per day.

What I *don’t* need, is all of the superfluous information and extra 
text boxes that the on-site spam reporting methods provide the end user 
with. All I really need is the two or three lines showing the content of 
the spam (which also asks the user to make sure it really is spam), the 
list of e-mail addys that it will report to, and the “submit report” 
button. I don’t need the (often) 200+ lines of detailed spam-parsing 
info (which still comes up, even if you turn it off in the options), nor 
do I need any of the form textareas that allow you to add additional 
comments to the outgoing spam reports. And finally, I do not need the 
summary page that shows me where reports were sent - I would rather the 
page just default to the next piece of unreported spam in the queue.

The only way I know around this is by customizing my own spam reporting 
pages (which would be hosted on my own server), that would screen scrape 
for any “unreported spam saved” links on the submission page, and parse 
those pages for *only* the basic information that I need. The easiest 
way would be via a web service making use of SOAP or XMLHTTP. The other 
option would be screen scraping, which would break whenever the layout 
of the critical content that is being searched for changes.

TIA.
...Geshel
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