Well, John. I'm sure that's a rhetorical question, but I'm feeling a little chatty while I listen to hold music.
SpamCop and pretty well every other blacklisting service make no allowance for how much good mail is coming from an IP address. They only do blacklisting. The funny thing is that since IronPort now owns SpamCop.net, you'd think that they could use the statistics that they expose at SenderBase.org to adjust the weighting mechanism that SpamCop uses. I'm sure that a) AOL isn't perfect, and spam does come from some accounts, b) Automated (and semi-automated) listing mechanisms like SpamCop will impede traffic c) AOL is the ISP that everyone loves to hate. SpamCop users may well go ahead and and report suspicious emails. d) Spam and virus blowblack needs to be carefully weeded out by ISPs so that they don't get listed by sending unexpected responses to forged addresses. It's been said by wiser heads, but I'll say it again for folks without John's depth of experience: Don't weigh individual tests high enough to be caught by a single false positive. That likely means that you will get some spam in, but that's preferable to blocking mail that you shouldn't. I've been burned by multiple ip4r tests blocking ISPs, and have counterweighted those mail servers accordingly. That also means that I'm more likely to get spam. I'll also add that false positives in blacklisting has made content inspection much more important to me. Mail Sniffer from SortMonster.com helps me out a huge amount, and has taken away much of my burden for maintaining my own filter text files. A SURBL lookup like invIURIBL from invariantsystems.com or via spamassassin would certainly help out too (but I'm not there yet). Andrew 8) -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of John Tolmachoff (Lists) Sent: Monday, February 28, 2005 7:10 AM To: Declude.JunkMail@declude.com Subject: [Declude.JunkMail] SpamCop listing AOL webmail servers http://www.spamcop.net/bl.shtml?205.188.139.132 WHY? (grumble mumble grumble &^%&^$^*(&^%^%&^&^&) John Tolmachoff Engineer/Consultant/Owner eServices For You --- [This E-mail was scanned for viruses by Declude Virus (http://www.declude.com)] --- This E-mail came from the Declude.JunkMail mailing list. To unsubscribe, just send an E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], and type "unsubscribe Declude.JunkMail". The archives can be found at http://www.mail-archive.com. --- [This E-mail was scanned for viruses by Declude Virus (http://www.declude.com)] --- This E-mail came from the Declude.JunkMail mailing list. To unsubscribe, just send an E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], and type "unsubscribe Declude.JunkMail". The archives can be found at http://www.mail-archive.com.
