Re: www.spamcop.net

From: adam bultman <adamb@glaven.org>
Date: Sun Mar 04 2007 - 16:31:23 AKST

I have a few friends that work at IronPort, which now manages/owns
spamcop. The best way to help (from what I've been told) is to use
spamtraps, and to send spamtrap email to them. I have one buddy who has
a few spamtraps set up on his domain, and anything the spamtrap receives
is automatically sent to spamcop. I trust spamtraps more than
user-submitted spam since far too many users have hair trigger reporters
(I personally have been reported by one person several times on a LUG in
Michigan because the word 'localhost' appeared in my headers. He
apologized for his autoreporting, but didn't change it. Therefore,
anytime he got an email from me, and I used PINE to send the mail, I'd
get reported.) Other people are simply jerks and will report you for
very flimsy reasons.

You can utilize spamcop's blacklist by incorporating their blacklist
with your MTA or your local filter (like spamassassin) although I would
recommend a milter of some form. Until very recently I used the SBL to
help control spam. The milter I used would do a lookup of the
connecting IP address, and if listed in the SBL, denied the client the
ability to complete the SMTP session (it would deny everything as soon
as the client did a MAIL FROM.) That saves your bandwidth, since you
don't need to accept a ton of spam, saves CPU usage since you don't need
to finish processing the mail and perhaps run it through a filter after
it is accepted, it saves my disk space since I don't have to store as
much spam, and it keeps me from landing on other people's blacklists,
since I won't be bouncing as much crap and ticking off other people's
servers.

Recently, the SBL has become very pokey to my mail servers so I've had
to disable my SBL milters. As a result, I've landed on a few lists
simply because I will bounce spoofed mail (mostly because of spam to
full mailboxes) and the recipient server will get irritated and
blacklist me. Speeding up the blacklist can be done in two ways: 1)
Pay the $1000 or so a year to get a copy of the SBL, 2) Host a copy of
the SBL for Spamcop on your setup and give them a dedicated FreeBSD
server with root access and >=1Mbit of bandwidth.

I'd recommend people to use the SBL. You'll get some false positives
(Spamcop and Yahoo! Groups have been fighting for a long time, and
therefore you'll need to whitelist Yahoo Groups' IP Blocks) but by and
large, most of the blocked IP addresses are "legitimate" spammers. If
your milter/filter supports whitelists, you won't have many problems.
It's much easier to explain to a handful of angry people why they can't
send you email than explain to your entire customer base why they can't
send mail to say, Yahoo, or AOL, or Hotmail because you got blacklisted.

Adam

Damien Hull wrote:

>Does anyone know anything about www.spamcop.net ?
>
>I just joined and sent them some of my spam. I hope it does some good.
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Received on Sun Mar 4 16:31:47 2007

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