[SpamCop-List] Re: Does it really help?

[Mike Easter]

Jeff wrote:
> How could it increase Spam when its supposed to help people?

No, I said that improper handling of spam could increase it, not the
reporting.

> What is the point of using Spamcop
> if they aren't going to terminate people's accounts who Spam?  It
> even says that on their website, that Spammers often lose their
> accounts and have to pay fees for Spamming.  That's misleading if you
> don't really do much to help with Spammers!!

A little history may be useful here.

Once upon a time, spammers might spam from their own account.  Parsing
the spam and determing the source and notifying the provider for the
source could result in the spammer losing the account s/he spammed from.

Skipping past some intermediate history involving abusing anonymizing
smtp servers, we have now reached the days where spamming typically
comes by the spammer abusing open proxies or trojans.

That means that determining the 'source' only shows it to be the abused
computer.  It could even be your own computer if you were so trojanized.
That is as far as the source of spam can be determined, and the result
of that report would be that /your/ provider would be notified about the
spam which came from your computer.  But your provider knows that you
and many others like you aren't intentionally spamming, so the it isn't
likely for to lose your account -- because you didn't even know you were
spamming.  You were simply 'configured insecurely'.

The actual /source/ of the spam which came from your computer can't be
determined because that is the mechanism of proxy/trojan abuse.  The
abused computer doesn't keep records of who abused it.

As a result of that 'situation' - spamcop reports are less likely to
cause loss of accounts of the 'innocent' abused proxies -- and even when
they do, the spammer has a 'stable' of unlimited other abusable proxies
to use if yours goes away.  So, the spamcop reportage of a source
doesn't have the same impact or inconvenience to the spammer that it
once did.  The spammer is hiding in the weeds.


-- 
Mike Easter
kibitzer, not SC admin