[SC-Help] Re: How to contact somebody sending a complaint.

[John E. Malmberg]

Benoit Panizzon wrote:
> Hey all
> 
> We're an ISP and Spamcop Complaints get into our Tracker System, generating 
> an Auto-Reply to the sender with an Incident ID.
> 
> This caused Spamcop to drop all Emails from our Tracker System, as most 
> customer apparently do not want to get any reply (not even results) about 
> the complaints they sent.

Please set up an incoming e-mail address for spamcop.net reports that 
does not auto-ack and then inform the deputies (at)spamcop.net about it.

That is what other ISPs have done.

> Now we got a bit a strange complaint where I would need to contact the 
> person sending that complaint.
> The Email is Munged and except of the receiving server I can't find any 
> information to identify the address involved.
> 
> Is there a way to contact the person submitting the complaint?

That has been answered.  Each spamcop.net report is sent from a valid 
temporary e-mail address that will route a report from a human.

> Is the id at reports.spamcop.net valid even if answered from a different email 
> address or is just everything dropped once an ISP is set to 'drop'?

There does not appear to be any setting to just drop everything.  I have 
received several replies to reports I have submitted.

> We're hosting the 'spamvertized' website. It is the Website of a Medicinal 
> Magazine.
> 
> After the complaint we asked our customer why he sent spam. His reply way: 
> This is not Spam. We sent this Email to all of our registered customers. 

That is also the same excuse that many spammers do and also the excuse 
of many people who do not confirm subscriptions, or make the erroneous 
assumption that an e-mail address for confirming billing / shipping 
information should be sent unsolicited advertising.

One thing to look at is where did the reported spam come from.  It 
should be in the spamcop.net report.   Is there a clear and obvious 
relationship between the sending network and the web site?

If there is not, then there is a very high probability that your 
customer is pulling a fast one on you and is using another ISP for the 
mailing simply to try and avoid spam reports.  Not having the clear and 
obvious relationship between the sending network and sending e-mail name 
and the the domain name the web site is on could be considered a 
violation of the can-spam law?

And is this a paid for magazine, or one of the ones that starts being 
mailed to anyone that they can get a postal address for?

Spammers and other kooks will deliberately sign up e-mail addresses that 
they suspect belong to spam reporters or anyone that they do not like on 
any mailing list that does not confirm the subscription just to cause 
this type of trouble.

> So now I would like to ask the complainer if he is not maybe really a 
> subscriber of that magazine. And thus should not have reported this email as 
> spam as there is a relationship between the email sender and recipient.

All you have to do is contact the temporary e-mail in the spamcop.net 
report.

It could have been an accident.  Especially if the unexpected e-mail is 
sent in anything other than plain text.  The presence of pictures or 
HTML on an unsolicited message can cause many content filters to 
misclassify a message as spam.  And some reporters just blindly report 
anything their content filter tags as spam through spamcop.net.

A business should never assume that a mailing should be in anything 
other than plain-text and no attachments.

> Not at all. We are a Cable ISP.

But since your customer admitted sending the e-mail, and they used a 
different service than it hosting the web site, that in it self looks 
very suspicious.   That is a spammer behavior to avoid getting their web 
page taken down for spam reports.

-John
wb8tyw at qsl.network
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