Hello, Are there any representatives of SpamCop here?
Last week or so I noticed that I can no longer send SpamCop reports to a large hosting provider. The option now shows up as: abuse#[email protected] with no explanatory text. In the past when I have seen this, I have assumed that SpamCop was unable to find a reporting address, or the address bounces, or the provider has told SpamCop to stop sending them reports. Since… a) I know this used to work, and b) this is a pretty big provider that I am often sending reports to, and c) I know that provider is represented on this list …yesterday I sent the representative of that provider a direct email asking why they are no longer accepting SpamCop reports. Today they kindly replied to let me know that they still welcome SpamCop reports but SpamCop has decided that their customers have been listwashing and for that reason SpamCop will not send them any further reports. I don't know any more details, particularly I don't know the scale involved here. I suppose I could see an argument that if there's a huge number of reports then the provider is letting their customers listwash when they should be enforcing AUP on them. But is that SpamCop's fight? From my end as the reporter I'm not really seeing much of an uptick in reports to this large provider, and I do sometimes get a response from them to say they're dealing with stuff, so I'd prefer that I could continue sending reports. So, should SpamCop be in the business of caring whether providers [allow their customers to] listwash? Until today I had always been under the impression that SpamCop was merely putting reporters in contact with providers, not making value judgements on the quality of the abuse desk. Given the choice of either not reporting or risking listwashing, I think I would rather risk the listwash. I can do my own analysis to decide whether to stop reporting and start blocking more aggressively. If SpamCop really wants to take a stance on listwashing then I would much rather they gave an option on their reporting page. At the moment there are some providers who do not accept the anonymised SpamCop reports and for these SpamCop leaves the checkbox unchecked. When you check it, it pops up a warning saying that your real email address will be passed along if you continue. Perhaps they could do similar for the providers they deem to allow too much listwashing? Fundamentally, the way it is now, it is not possible to distinguish providers who refuse reports from providers who SpamCop refuses to report to, and I think that is not ideal. In fact, I have used SpamCop's ability to send reports or not as part of my stance on how aggressively to deal with email from various providers before, thinking that it's always down to the provider. I now realise that may have been an incorrect assumption. What are the list's thoughts? Is there some other service other than SpamCop that I should be using to send reports? I do not have time to check headers and send emails to individual abuse addresses on individual samples of spam. Checking SpamCop's workings and then hitting send is much more convenient, but this has really dented my confidence in it. On the other side as a very small hoster, I occasionally receive SpamCop reports about my customers and generally find them actionable and useful so this is a real shame. (I did already also fill in SpamCop's contact form to query this situation, but wondered whether there were any SpamCop reps here and also if my views on this are in a minority.) Cheers, Andy _______________________________________________ mailop mailing list [email protected] https://chilli.nosignal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mailop
