Stop Using SpamCop!
Written February 22nd, 2006
<rant>
General notice to everyone on the Internet. Please don’t use filters that make use of SpamCop’s blacklists. SpamCop has been blocking virtually all mail from Gmail (at least for me, anyhow) because apparently one user on Gmail sent some spam. So now the rest of us are suffering. That’s an absolutely retarded system. Don’t use it. There are far better ways of stopping spam.
</rant>
Update: Several commenters disagree, and suggest that perhaps a lower weight should be assigned instead of the cessation of usage. I disagree with their disagreement and so on. And apparently I’m not alone.
Another viable solution would be to avoid sharing the same outgoing MX IP# as a large number of other users, since sooner or later one of them is going to be an idiot^Wspammer.
Constructive answer: use SpamAssassin where you assign a weight (a little bit below your threshold) to the various RBLs, including spamcop.net. If that’s all that’s wrong with the mail, it won’t be blocked.
I would love to “avoid sharing the same outgoing MX IP# as a large number of other users” but I should point out that there are very, very few workable ways to do that if I’m correctly understanding how this all works. Which is why blacklisting those IPs is a terrible idea (at least, without having a whitelist to prevent certain IPs from getting blacklisted). Especially when there are so many better solutions such as greylisting.
Unfortunately, I don’t control whomever is using the spam blockers. So I can hope they do as you suggest, but there’s nothing I can do about it really. All I can do is sit here and be annoyed as SpamCop spams me over and over again with messages telling me that my mail has been rejected because pproxy.gmail.com is currently on their ban list.
As Tim Haynes mentioned, most good email admins never rely on one blacklist and instead have a weight-based system.
Spamcop never blocks because of one complaint. It requires many. If there is a problem and Google isn’t responding, then Spamcop will add them to the list. I’m sure they’ll remove Gmail IPs from the list when the spam problem is resolved.
Apparently the problem, according to Google, or at least from what I gathered from their reply (that didn’t really make that much sense to me) to my support request, is that they’re intentionally entering the wrong value into one of the headers (in order to avoid exposing customer IP addresses) and it’s confusing SpamCop into thinking that everyone using GMail is the same person.
So it’s not clear to me whether it’s SpamCop being dumb and actually believing Google, or Google being dumb and causing all their users to suffer for the actions of a few bad apples.
But frankly, SpamCop is still the one doing the blocking, so I think it’s their responsibility to avoid false positives, and it’s terribly annoying to have virtually all my mail getting bounced back to me, despite containing very obviously non-spammy content.
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