The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[elijah <address@concealed>]

Hargitai Gabor <address@concealed> wrote:
> - did anybody on the list have similar problem with spamcop or other
>   anti-spam service? What are your experiences?

Yes. spamcop is E-V-I-L. An attacker can easily keep you blocked by
spamcop by filing false reports. There are no meaningful checks and
balances with spamcop. And, as you say, bounces are often reported as
spam.

This is especially true of AOL. When an AOL user gets a bounce message
from us (because a spam virus sent mail to us using their address) they
will report it as spam. Then AOL thinks we are a spam source and they
start to block us. We know this because at least AOL will send you the
supposed 'spam' message.

Currently, we are being blocked by SORBS. Not because of anything we
have done, but because SORBS has decided to block the entire class C of
our upstream network provider. No doubt the the upstream provider has
some bad eggs, but they do dedicated hosting for thousands of servers.
Instead of helping the ISP pinpoint the bad egg, SORBS has decided to
collectively punish all its clients and refuses to unblock us.

We have to be very careful about switching IP addresses: most the big
providers will block us instantly if they start getting a flood of email
from a new IP. So we have to painfully trickle out emails to them and
increase the rate over time until they are comfortable with the new IP.
They are like easily spooked deer.

Basically, it seems as if email as a protocol is breaking down. The
'solutions' against spam are becoming worse than the problem. Unless you
are a giant provider which is immune from block listing (who is going to
block yahoo groups?) I think it is becoming a dicey prospect to run a
list server.

-elijah