Re: Trying to find out cause of blacklisting

James wrote:

> I've been running mail servers (qmail) for about a decade, and I found
> out yesterday that one of them had been blacklisted by SpamCop.

You could have found out a lot more information here or even all by
yourself by naming the IP here then, which you didn't do, or by
following the links yourself which are provided for a listed IP, which
are no longer provided to the public for an unlisted IP.

The other advantage of naming the IP here would be the possibility that
some of us here might be able to 'guess' at the problem for some
particular server.  Another advantage would be that given an IP, we can
say how any spamcop report about that IP would be addressed.

It is also possible that if the listing were caused by hitting spamtraps
alone that no address would have been provided any reports about the
spamsourcing.

> nobody
> from SpamCop has replied to my request for details of exactly why it
> was blacklisted.

If it were listed for hitting spamtraps, the evidence is not provided.
Also, if the form of your request were to 'dispute' the listing, that
won't get you anywhere.  The deputy would look at the parse for the
spamtrap hits and find the spamsource to have been accurately derived,
and the dispute would be ignored.

An admin can make request to be notified about spamcop reports, but the
admin won't get links to the evidence for spamtrap hits.

Servers are most often listed because of some kind of backscatter or
autoresponder behavior -- in which the server receives a spam and
accepts the spam for delivery and then can't deliver the spam to the
mailbox, and so then the server which has foolishly accepted a spam it
can't deliver decides to create a newmail addressed to the spam's bogus
>From which might be a reporter or a spamtrap..

That newmail hits a spamtrap and that abusive backscatter is spamcop
reportable and contributes to the server becoming spamcop blocklisted.

> If I could get a copy of the offending message, with full headers, it
> would be possible to find out how/why this happened, as I don't want
> it to happen again.

If it hit a spamtrap, that's not going to happen.  If it hit a reporter,
every SC report is reported to what is presumed to be the appropriate
admin to be notified.  If you aren't the one, then someone else got the
report with a link to the evidence.

> I have had no other reports of Spam from that server, so it makes it
> all the more perplexing.  If somebody could point me to somebody who
> could help me on this, I'd appreciate it.

How did you try to contact a SC person and what is the IP of the
previously listed server?

-- 
Mike Easter
kibitzer, not SC admin