I thank Duncan for his note, and invite SpamCop to confirm. If SpamCop has reverted back to its original policy of blacklisting only spammers at the lowest level of reasonable granularity -- an IP address -- that seems encouraging. But SpamCop's FAQ still says it blacklists entire /24 networks merely to punish a few miscreants, so it's unclear what's going on: http://spamcop.net/fom-serve/cache/297.html Also, thanks to Ed Felten's blog (freedom-to-tinker.com), here's an item about Amy Wohl's Opinions newsletter being blacklisted because it's (gasp!) hosted at Verio: http://amywohl.weblogger.com/2002/10/31 BTW I've been asked what Internet providers offer SpamAssassin filtering with a POP account. I don't know of a comprehensive list, but I do know the Well does. -Declan --- From: Duncan Murdoch To: declanat_private Subject: More on SpamCop Date: Wed, 06 Nov 2002 14:08:45 -0500 Declan, feel free to post this to the list. Please don't include my email address. SpamCop has come under a lot of fire here lately because your server got blacklisted. It was blacklisted because of a recent change to the SpamCop listing rules that attempted to stop spammers from round-robin spamming: send from a whole block of IPs, with none of them sending quite enough spam to get listed. As you know, SpamCop's first goal is to "provide a system which will flag the most spam with the least 'collateral damage' (flagging of wanted email)." The rule change that got your server listed was attempting to address the "flag most spam" part of this goal, but it violated the "least collateral damage part". Guess what? The rule was changed last night. Politechbot.com is no longer listed, and it seems pretty unlikely that it will be incorrectly listed again. Of course, it's always possible: people make mistaken reports sometimes, algorithms don't act as intended, and so on. In an earlier thread, jhhat_private said that the reason some netblocks aren't listed is because of payoffs to SpamCop. He gave this as gossip, but offered 66.197.140.2 as proof. That net block looks to me like one of the round-robin spammers I mentioned above (though I don't know this for sure; maybe everyone there opted-in, and forgot). They have been caught by the new rules, and I think it's a good thing. The rules that SpamCop uses will always have loopholes that spammers will try to exploit, and will never be able to be 100% accurate at letting non-spam pass through. But give them a break: they're trying. Duncan Murdoch A satisfied SpamCop user ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Like Politech? Make a donation here: http://www.politechbot.com/donate/ Recent CNET News.com articles: http://news.search.com/search?q=declan -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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