Re: [Declude.JunkMail] How accurate is spamcop

[Matt]

SpamCop has a serious problem with blacklisting large ISP mail servers.  Just yesterday I had three false positives partially caused by SpamCop weighted at about 45% of my hold weight for the domains in question, and hitting E-mail coming from adelphia.net, wanadoo.fr and netvision.net.il, all large ISP mail servers.  Based on my review of SpamCop on these ISP mail servers, I estimate that they have between a 1 in 20 and a 1 in 50 chance of a message getting improperly tagged when they come through such an ISP.  This also caries over to the likes of AOL and Road Runner. I once contacted one of their "Deputies" about the issue and their response was that "SpamCop is aggressive."  Unfortunately their failure to resolve this long-standing problem of treating an ISP mail server that sends 99.99% legit E-mail just the same as a mail server belonging to a spam house weakens the value of their blacklist a great deal and causes administrators like ourselves a lot of frustration that something so obvious couldn't be corrected. SpamCop also has a fundamental flaw in that submitted spam that gets forwarded from one server to a destination often causes the forwarding server to get tagged, and forged headers can also trick them from time to time. I would suggest weighting SpamCop at no more than 60% of your hold weight, and add as many reliable tests as possible.  SpamCop is however a very important test, and it accurately flags about 2/3 of the spam reaching my server. Matt Doris Dean wrote: Is it safe to simply delete an email flagged with spamcop?   TIA Doris -- ===================================================== MailPure custom filters for Declude JunkMail Pro. http://www.mailpure.com/software/ =====================================================