On 25 Jul 2005, at 12:39, Bill Verity wrote:

>We've been blocked a lot recently by SpamCop.  Anything we should do to avoid this problem?

Subscribers can't have reliable (list) mail delivery and use SpamCop.

Maelstrom was blocked 3 times in 4 days late last week by SpamCop, their
web page claims that the block is due to something turning up in one of
their double secret spam traps which they will neither disclose or
discuss.  Given that the server is in its final year of operation I have
repeatedly gone through the mail queues looking for mail stalled due to
SpamCop blacklisting, and deleted the subscribers and their mail.  I
will no longer support subscriptions from ISP's using SpamCop because:

Subscribers can't have reliable (list) mail delivery and use SpamCop.

First... we aren't talking about blacklisting, we are talking about a
single organization that has repeatedly blacklisted us over a period of
several years, never to my knowledge because we actually did anything
wrong.  The server has no human users (aside from me) and does not relay.

We've been blacklisted because other sites (Yahoo) have apparently had
mail server malfunctions (according to spamcop) that garbled the headers
leaving us implicated.  We've been blacklisted because we bounced mail
forged by W32.Netsky.C that was sent TO us.  We've been called on the
carpet repeatedly due to forgeries submitted by irate subscribers trying
to punish other subscribers.  By subscribers reporting *valid* (and
not-so-valid) commercial messages posted by other subscribers.  And, yes,
it's embarrassing but we've been blacklisted most often by confused
list-owners who forwarded spam sent to their generic *-owner accounts.

In all cases where we've had contact with SpamCop we've seemingly found
them to be polite well-intentioned people who responded quickly and
corrected *their* problems.  We've been assured that they would take
steps to be a bit less trigger happy in the future towards our server,
and then they blacklist us again.  The truth, in my experience is:

Subscribers can't have reliable (list) mail delivery and use SpamCop.

                                              -Kary

Blacklisting.  My problems have been mostly limited to SpamCop but
given my understanding that these days most spam is coming from "zombie"
networks comprised of thousands of virus compromised PC's, none with
any guaranteed life expectancy or guaranteed static IP's, isn't this
particular approach to fighting spam getting a bit long in the tooth?
As far as SpamCop goes I can say with certainty that the "cure" has always
had far more negative impact on us than the disease.