[SC-Help] Re: Blocked? Read this.

[Sofa King Tyred of Lar Ting]

Me wrote:
> "Sofa King Tyred of Lar Ting" <nobody at devnull.spamcop.net> wrote in message 
> news:d0qvjq$ha0$1 at news.spamcop.net...

[much angry blathering deleted]

The senderbase.org site is a good place to start to make sure your IP 
isn't listed for other reasons. Believe it or not, people in this group 
do want to help. Being agressive (and calling people idiots) is not 
winning you points.

> If spam fighting is a war, then we are loosing judging by the percentage of 
> spam increase on my spam filtering server at work since lart year. 

Spammers are crafty guys -- they have teamed up with virus-writers since 
about a year now and zombie armies are now used in the war. Some of your 
own ISP's zombied machines are probably sending close to 100,000 
messages/day, and likely your ISP isn't doing anything about it. They 
could even be making money off the added bandwidth consumption.

Vent some anger at your congress person, your ISP, telecoms software 
producers, etc. It's better spent there than in the SpamCop groups.

> You might 
> of had to deal with collateral damage related to the zombie home PCs, but I 
> have to addresses lost businesses because SpamCop's action. Our business 
> relies heavily on the email systems and we most certainly would not do 
> anything to hurt our own business by sending out spam. We do require from 
> our email server to auto-reply to undeliverable emails due to the business 
> requiremnents. 

Hmm... Looks like we may be getting somewhere with the reasons for being 
listed!

Spammers have (relatively recently) begun exploiting auto-reply to 
undeliverable emails (NDRs). If this is the reason you're listed, then 
sorry to hear you are caught up in this!

At my own day job, we ran into this same problem -- the sysadmins didn't 
understand why they got black-listed, and griped a lot at first. They 
finally configured the mail server to REJECT instead of generating NDRs.

> Our clients and partners do require notification should email 
> not reach the intended recipient. 

With proper SMTP server software, this is possible, without allowing 
spammers to exploit it. Here is a good source of information, which 
requires some understanding of how to configure a mail exchanger:

http://www.spamcop.net/fom-serve/cache/329.html

> My company can loose money, if our email 
> servers aren't doing this. This is RFC822 compliant and SpamCop should not 
> arbitrary change the RFC.

I'm not sure that spamcop is alone in black-listing backscattering MXs. 
It's not arbitrary -- spammers exploit this! It's not a change, as far 
as I know, in any RFC. There is ambiguity in many text-based RFCs, and 
there are degrees of freedom. Just because Microsoft's implementation of 
an RFC is one way, and other systems do it another, doesn't mean it's a 
change in the RFC.

>>Help fight spam by "educating" the lax, zombie-hosting ISPs:
> 
> How? By implementing non-RFC compliant arbitrary rule and punishing people 
> for the previous sins of their current IP address? The worst is that in the 
> US anyone is considered innocent until proven guilty. The exception is 
> SpamCop where they pronounce you guilty and then you have jump through loops 
> to prove that your are not guilty. And for what? Marginal effect at best to 
> the Spam emails. SpamCop's action does hurt legitimate businesses and does 
> nothing to the spammers. The spammers can switch email servers on a dime, 
> but I cannot. My only options are to change the server IP address, or hope 
> that there will be no other self rightious people who forgot that they did 
> actually subscribe to your email notification.

Please read the links about mis-directed bounces. I think listing 
non-compliant mail servers for NDRs is a reasonable thing to do, given 
the spam situation.

Before the times when spammers were exploiting open or mis-configured 
mail relays/proxies, many sysadmins were unaware of the potential 
problem. You could argue that leaving a relay open was RFC-compliant, 
right? Nobody imagined the problem at the time the RFC was written. 
Today, nobody comes onto spamcop to complain about being listed because 
their MX is an open relay (at least that I've ever seen).

If your mail server is capable of REJECTING during SMTP connection any 
mis-addressed messages, legitimately mis-addressed email will cause the 
sender to be informed (by his connecting client or mail server, and not 
yours).

On the other hand, vacation auto-replies are likely to cause everyone 
problems -- this is a hard pill to swallow. If your mail server has a 
good spam-blocking strategy, then you can hope that such replies won't 
go to spam traps -- but I think you run the risk of winding up on a 
block-list again.

-- 
Help fight spam by "educating" the lax, zombie-hosting ISPs:
http://pages.infinit.net/filmore/educateYourISP.htm