[SC-Help] Re: should I report these myself?

[Mike Easter]

Robert wrote:
> You tell me. There is nothing wrong with my local mail delivery,
> perhaps some point in the delivery chain is holding on to the
> messages to make them old deliberately?

The only item I've seen is this one

www.spamcop.net/sc?id=z744138338z9fbe3e7518ecb3843f38750d645af6bdz

  Abbreviated Received lines *comment
  from wps-1.merrimac (WPS-1 [192.168.100.9]) by merrexch.merrimac 20
Mar *serves you
  from 193.13.73.216 by 192.168.0.100;  7 Mar *sourceline

Those headers are totally incompetent.  Your provider's domainname isn't
'merrexch.merrimac' and its IP isn't that non-routing IP.  So the
Received tracelines are RFC non-complaint.

That being sed, we are left to guess who your provider really is and
what its IP really is and how those headerlines should've been
configured.  I don't have time to figure that out right now, but I'm
assuming that whatever merrimac is supposed to really be and whatever IP
it is really supposed to be received the item from the source almost 2
weeks ago and held onto it before putting it in your mailbox.

>> Reporting old spamsources isn't very useful compared to reporting
>> fresh ones.
>
> Are you saying that you don't recommend I report the messages myself
> if I can't use spamcop?

No I'm not saying that.  The advantage to having a little template fixed
up so that you can quickly and succinctly notify spamsources or
spamvertisers or whatever solves the entire problem of suboptimal
situations about how the parser reporter works.

What I meant was that we who use the SCbl as part of our spam management
strategy realize that its great value is in how 'frisky' it is about
early listings of spamsources.  If an IP can spam for two weeks before
the SCbl hears about it, SC isn't really interested in hearing about it
any more.  Or listing it for that matter.  If something has already quit
spamming, what is the point of listing it to cause trouble for the
nonspammers.

> If I continue to receive these messages every
> day - always from the same IP - tell me why it would not be useful to
> report them.

You should report them.  You should be getting your spams fresh from
your provider and your should be reporting them promptly.  You tried to
report that as soon as it got into your mailbox, but it looks like your
provider held it for a long time.  Altho' the headers are so bad it is
hard to figure out just exactly who your provider is.

-- 
Mike Easter
kibitzer, not SC admin