unwanted email....?!

. . . Mailwasher has actually labeled certain pieces of email as viruses. Of course, I delete them on the server.

My problem with using Spamcop-anything is that it is indiscriminate in it's labeling of emails. Like other blanket solutions, it takes into account hops that may be en route to you, and if a hop has gotten itself on a list for whatever reason, the email coming to you that uses that hop - even though legitimate - is labeled spam.

I am having to designate newsletters to which I have subscribed as "Friend," so the headers won't be compared to the lists used by Spamcop and it's analogs.

Spamcop isn't the only culprit blocking legitimate email because of its "guidelines," but a goodly number of very useful ezines are labeled spam by it.

On my list of things to do is an analysis of the emails that get screwed because of Spamcop's "helpfulness," and to try to determine why each is being rejected. Just eyeballing my subscriptions, one popular list service has been listed, so anything coming from there is labeled Spam.

(That's what happened in the case of both Seedzine and the Ehotsheet.)

My recommendation is to use Mailwasher, let it show you what mail you have on the server, then you label the stuff you want so it gets through to you.

Marye

One of the hops (computers) between my machine and Seedzine/Ehotsheet computers has gotten onto Spamcops list, so when that machine turns up in the headers, those mailings are labeled spam.

> One of the hops (computers) between my
> machine and Seedzine/Ehotsheet computers has
> gotten onto Spamcops list, so when that
> machine turns up in the headers, those
> mailings are labeled spam.

Hi Mary,

Thanks for mentioning why there's this problem with getting the SeedZine/EHotsheet - I can't really control which route email from me gets to you by, so that makes this a difficult problem to control...!

I do my best to make sure people really want any ezine they're getting from me.... We use a double opt-in system (you have to confirm you really want it, after you've subscribed), and every issue has unsubscription information (at the end), so anyone can unsubscribe at any time.

Thanks Mary, your explanations are very illuminating!

- Dien Rice

The problem isn't that the enroute computer has been labeled as a spammer... it's that it's been labeled as "having an open relay." This means that there's a security hole on that computer that hackers can exploit -- and MAY have exploited before.

The complaint MAY not have come from Spancop, since manually doing complaints (as many of the oldstyle gripers do) would have forwarded the note about the open relay to RBLS (the Black Hole list, which is NOT maintained by Spamcop). It can also come via other routes (since hackers spider for open relays, some of the big spam blocking companies ALSO spider for open relays.) Our mail system where I work got into the RBLS because we did, indeed, have an open relay.

We weren't spamcopped. It was caught by a spider and reported.

...trying to explain it to the folks who set up the internet connections ...took quite a bit of time. Many ISPs are actually unaware of this security issue and are unaware that they have problems until someone reports it.

So yes, ISPs do get blocked. They need to know about it so they can patch the security hole and then reappy to the RBLS folks to be taken off the list (this is what we did.) RBLS will then spider you and if your security drops, you can end up on their RBLS list again.

But this isn't Spamcop's doing. It's the keepers of the RBLS list which many firewalls use to block spammers.

Hosting spammers (and ignoring pleas for assistance in stopping them or refusing to kick them off) is another way to get onto one of these filter lists. And still a third is to host sellers of "spam tools." Because the IPs of the service providers themselves get blocked, anyone using legitimate, non-spamming services hosted on these IPs is also blocked.

I did quite a bit of research on this this summer, so I'm certain of the above. Also, there are quite a number of these online filter systems, however Mailwasher uses two open relay databases (ORDB [relays.ordb.org] and VISI [relays.visi.com]) and the Spamcop list - bl.spamcop.net.

It shows what was used to judge whether to blacklist an email automatically.

As an added tidbit, China seems to be the leading "open relay" country to the extent that many hosts simply block any mail coming from there. These hosts report having little success in getting the Chinese to help by setting up their email servers correctly.

China is on my server's "block" list, and Japan is quickly earning a spot there. Much of the email I get from myself (yeah, right) originates at a Japanese server.

Marye