Re: Does it work?

Gareth wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I am new to spamcop. I recently opened an email account with my ISP 
> which has obviously been used before and receives around 10 spams per day.
> I have been reporting all the spam for nearly a month now but have not 
> noticed any change in the volume of spam I receive.
> Is this normal? Should I persevere or are these spammers just too good 
> at avoiding being being blocked?


sorry if this seems like I am teaching you how to suck eggs...

to reiterate what many have said here, via a bad analogy, by using 
spamcop (and by using, I mean reporting, as it sounds like you are 
doing...) then you are helping build a forcefield around the spammer's 
email sources - and we all thank you for helping 'us' build that field, 
otherwise know as the SpamCop block list (SCBL)...

The problem is, you are helping to build the force field from the 
*spammer's side* - you need to get on the other side (I DID tell you it 
was a bad analogy!!)

There are many ways of doing this, but the three main 'groups' of ways 
that I see are:

(1) using an ISP or some service online that uses the SCBL (and other 
lists and algorithms such as SpammAssasain) to re-direct the spam 
somewhere safe *before* you download it, where you can check it on a 
semi-regular basis to make sure it is spam, report it, then dump it... 
(for instance, Spamcop offers this mail filtering service themselves, 
allowing you to (semi) transparently keep your *current* email address 
and run it through the service' I use it and love it, very elegant and 
yet fully customisable interface, $50 a year, and you ALSO get another 
email address that I use for online shopping, newsgroups, etc as I know 
it is being heavily 'checked'; it also supports 'plusage', so I have 
[email protected], [email protected] or whatever so 
if I do get spam I can often see who leaked my email, if I feel so 
inclined [these are not 'real' email addresses BTW])

(2) get a service that 'intercepts' the mail on your PC *after* it comes 
off the mail server and been downloaded but *before* it gets to your 
email software and treats appropriately - i.e., the good stuff is let 
straight through, the bad is <whatever action you want, kinda>; for 
friends who don't care how it works, just don't want to see spam in 
their In Box I use SpamPal (free, but 'donation' encouraged) on Windoze 
OSs and it seems to be pretty 'set and forget' (but you can tweak it as 
you need, if for instance it is being too aggressive)

(3) you likely know about this one - this doesn't use the SCBL or other 
BLs, etc - but any decent email software such as Thunderbird (and even 
bad email software such as Outlook - woops, is my prejudice showing...) 
has junk filters now... kinda "AI" - when you first start using it, you 
manually mark spam as junk, it will trundle itself off to a sub-folder 
where you can deal with it; as you use the software more and more, it 
gets smarter and smarter (sic!) about what you consider spam and marks 
it itself - and you can easily un-mark (sic) it - and if say you are on 
a list about, I don't know, rooster husbandry, you can whitelist 
incoming addresses (i.e., tell the software that any email from that 
address will never be junk)

Anyway...

Just a point - I used 'force field' rather than 'wall' in my analogy as 
in a sense the SCBL is a vibrant, dynamic list; as spammers get through 
it, 'we' report spam from these sources and that hole is now plugged AND 
if a previous sources 'cleans up its act' it will (eventually) come off 
the SCBL and email from there can flow freely through to those of use 
using the SCBL between the emails sources and their In Boxes...