Re: What's wrong now, Spamcop?

anon wrote:

> SC adm said my hotmail had been bouncing (for no discernable reason),
> so the account was suspended.

Once upon a time I belonged to a mailing list whose listserv server had
trouble interacting [actually getting mx information] from EL's servers
for some very complex and 'curious' reasons.  As a result of that, very
often the mailing list items would be delayed by hours, or days, or the
server would give up because of excessive delays.  The situation was
made more complex because no one else on the mailing list was having any
trouble receiving the list's mail, and no one else I knew at EL was
having any trouble receiving their mailing lists.  So the problem was
with the 'peculiarities' of the configuration of the listserver and the
configuration of EL's mx information.

That listserv had a 'process' by which it kept track of the mails which
failed, so that they could be retrieved by their item number, and it had
another process based on repeated failures which would unsubscribe the
recipient whose mails were failing -- after a test probe also failed.

Because there was such a problem with the listserver getting the EL
mx/es, it was common that the probing process woud take place, in
addition to the problems with much delayed mail and the problems with
mail which actually failed delivery, but in spite of that, I was never
actually unsubbed.  There's a point to that story because there were a
lot of glitches between the list server and my provider's server, but no
unsubbing or the equivalent of 'account suspended'.


In the case of SC, if there is even a temporary glitch, then the account
is suspended.  That has advantages and disadvantages;  but the principle
disadvantage is that maybe it is too easy for the account to become
suspended.  Maybe it should be a little 'harder' or more complicated.

The current system assumes that the account is going to be either
feeding spams to the webparser, or perhaps there is also an alert when
the regular reporter goes to the tracking url to complete the report.
That means that those who are doing everything by 'remote control' of
such as quick submits and no visiting of the webparser or the reporting
tracker wouldn't even know the account had been suspended because there
wouldn't be a 'trigger' to notify them.  They would have to notice the
absence of something -- namely SC replies to quick reporting..



-- 
Mike Easter
kibitzer, not SC admin