Re: Newbie to Spamcop - Am I doing this right?

Chris wrote:

> As a sideline, the email address I use I have had for around six
> years now, and is a massive target for the spammers - I get around
> 100-150 spam messages per day.

Some people find that clicking on 100-150 individual SC links and
'acting on' all of those notifies gets burdensome.  This is especially
true if you choose to research and evaluate some collection, say a
hundred or so, for 'further research'.

One further research technique is to evaluate, say, the next 100 of the
IP providers who are going to be notified as a spamvertiser provider.
You can perform this research by taking the IP which SC provides you in
the parse for the spamvertiser and 'plugging it in' to some multiple
database query tool such as that at DNSStuff or openrbl.

The likely discovery you will make is that a great many or nearly all of
the notified providers for spamvertisers are listed in some database
indicating that they are unresponsive, such a spamhaus, including its
ROKSO, known spamgang operations.  The 'bulletproof' concept.

Spamcop's notify of an unresponsive provider about a bulletproof
spamvertiser is not only toothless and useless, but some would consider
it to even be counterproductive, since the reporter is providing to the
blackhat cohort of the spammer/spamvertiser a copy of the evidence which
is only superficially munged by the normal SC default mungeing process.

Some people don't like to be notifying all of those blackhat
spamvertisers toothlessly and uselessly while spending a lot of time
clicking on SC links or perhaps unchecking the notifies of the
blackhats.  They would rather not do all of the clicking and unchecking
and toothless and useless spamvertiser notifies and only spend a few
seconds making the same contributions to the SCbl for spamsources by
quick reporting.

Personally, I think the spamcop process of notifying for spamvertisers
should be made optional to the reporter -- so that the reporter could
choose to devnull the spamvertiser provider notify and the spamvertiser
link, whether it is resolve or unresolved, would be fed to the sc-surbl
and only the spamsource provider would be notified, since the spamsource
report is the only thing which has the teeth of contributing to the
SCbl.

> At one point, I was very close to deleting my email account due to
> this amount of unsolicited mail (and considering sending out my own
> mailshot telling all my contacts that I had changed email addresses).


-- 
Mike Easter
kibitzer, not SC admin