Spamcop Vs Yahoo Et Al

[Head Guru]

Hello TCH Family,

 

Over the past few weeks we have seen an increase in the number of legitimate emails being blocked by SpamCop. The blocked emails are originating from Yahoo Email Servers. We continually monitor these types of issues and while the number of rejected emails has not technically raised our threshold level, several TCH clients have reached out to us for help.

Some of you may ask, what the heck is SpamCop. We use a variety of methods to slow down the amount of inbound spam to our account holders. One of these methods is the implementation of DNSBL or RBL. A very good explanation of this can be found on the internet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNSBL

We have successfully used SpamCop for many years to mitigate our inbound spam levels, however over the past few weeks we are starting to question the use of this tool.

Removing SpamCop is a very hard choice for system administrators to make. Do we sacrifice the good of the server farm to save a very small percentage of bounced emails. If we remove the use of RBL's the amount of inbound spam will increase by at least 25% and most likely that number will be close to a 50% increase in the spam levels.

 

We have reached out to SpamCop and have only received a very simple response that did not solve nor answer anything in regards to this issue.

 

My personal view is that I would rather have an occasional email bounced versus having to deal with a 25% increase in the amount of spam that I receive.

 

Why am I reaching out to everyone? Simply put, I would like to ask everyone to give TCH their input and help us make a collective choice that will effect every account holder here at TCH.

 

Please take a moment to give us your feedback here and then place your vote on how we should handle this issue.

 

Thank you for your time and as always thank you for your business.

[idallen]

You've got a good tech team there - can they not find a way to apply SpamCop on a per-domain basis, so that indvidual domains can opt-out? (I would opt out because I have my own excellent home-grown spam filtering and I can do a much better job than TCH of knowing what is and is not spam.)

 

I would think that all you'd need to do is let a domain specify a different MX record that bypassed the SpamCop filtering. Instead of MX=idallen.ca I would set up MX=directmx.idallen.ca and point that to a TCH server that didn't use SpamCop. (Depending on how the server works, it might even be the same server but the use of the alternate domain name would trigger a different set of mail rules that avoided the SpamCop problem. I don't know the details, but it seems possible without too much messing around?)

 

If TCH continues the Yahoo spam block (because SpamCop is being dumb about it), I will have to move my MX record to my own server. I can't tell all my friends on Yahoo to change email addresses.

 

P.S. Hi Bill! Long time no see!

Edited January 30, 2014 by idallen

[tchester]

I strongly support getting rid of spamcop if they won't stop blocking yahoo mail. it is ridiculous to bounce legitimate emails every time a yahoo user's computer gets hacked, especially since it is ineffective in bouncing the actual spam mail.

 

i'm losing something like HALF of legitimate email from yahoo users. one user had an email to me bounced THREE times before it finally came through on the fourth try. the two people with yahoo email addresses who send me emails regularly estimate that something like half of their emails to me bounce.

 

the spamcop setup doesn't work for yahoo email, or any other service that has a large bank of outgoing email servers, since each email goes randomly to a new server. so the computer sending spam still gets to send out a high percentage of the spam which won't be blocked, whereas legit users who get routed to the spamcop-blacklisted server have their emails rejected.

 

what really burns me is that i am still getting around 500 spam emails a day, even with the use of spamcop, yet spamcop is blocking legitimate email. my bet is that won't go up much by turning off spamcop. and even if it does, the thunderbird bayesian filter catches most of them, and my own filters catch essentially all the rest.

 

i would MUCH rather get an increase in spam than lose legitimate emails.

 

bill, thanks for trying to solve this problem! you'd think spamcop would implement a solution that would allow isp's to customize it a bit, to allow yahoo emails, rather than lose a customer.

 

the previous poster got it right: "I can't tell all my friends on Yahoo to change email addresses." instead, i, too, will have to move my email outside of totalchoicehosting if legitimate mail continues to be blocked at such a high rate.

[pamw]

I have noticed a uptick in spam, so much so that I am reading my email on the web instead of downloading so I can blacklist and delete some of them. I have been bounced off several email lists from a reputable University because of SpamCop, and actually filed a ticket because of it. That was not a Yahoo server, but SpamCop was blocking it.

 

I have not idea what is best, but I do know that SpamCop is causing me pain.

[tchester]

From this discussion, I realized that while Spamcop might be a great tool to block a spammer who always uses the same mail server, it is totally mismatched to blocking spam from places like yahoo with thousands of outgoing email servers. for email from yahoo, it ends up blocking as much, or more, legitimate email as it does spam email.

 

when a spammer using yahoo mail hits a spamcop trap address, spamcop will block that particular outgoing email server used for that message for one day. but the next thousands of spam emails won't be blocked since they will likely use a different outgoing email server at yahoo. instead, all the legitimate yahoo email users who happen to then use the blocked yahoo email server will find their legitimate emails blocked!

 

so what a terrible program! it rejects 1 out of 1,000 spam emails, but also rejects 1 out of 1,000 legitimate email messages from all yahoo users! since there can be many more legitimate users than spammers at yahoo (one hopes!), spamcop could be blocking many legitimate yahoo emails for every spam email it blocks.

 

this is the complete opposite of the rejection ratio that a spam filter is supposed to have.

 

unless spamcop can be configured to not block yahoo and gmail addresses, it is a terrible tool for any isp to use.

[Anna Hulse]

This is affecting my personal domain, and my business domain. For my personal domain - eh....it's annoying ,but I can deal or tell them to use my gmail account. I poll my personal domain via gmail anyway, so it just skips a step.

 

For my business, actually, non-profit, it's professionally embarrassing that Yahoo accounts are bounced as SPAM when they are trying to contact us about legitimate concerns. That person then has to reach out to us on public forums to get their issue addressed.

 

Can we turn Spamcop off individually? Both of these domains are polling our email via gmail which does their own spam filtering.

 

Thanks,

 

Anna

[shoes]

I dont know if anyone else took the time to look around the internet at this issue. I, shoes, have done this for all of us.

 

This problem is not going away until Yahoo steps up to the plate and takes SpamCop seriously. I have contacted many other hosting companies and not one of them is even aware of this issue let alone taking the stance that tch is so I think we all need to thank bill and dick and the staff at tch for at least listening to us.

 

I personally could give a rats behind about yahoo emailers.

Edited February 12, 2014 by shoes

[amansker]

>>>For my business, actually, non-profit, it's professionally embarrassing that Yahoo accounts are bounced as SPAM when they are trying to contact us about legitimate concerns.<<<<

 

What she said. It is terrible to have to make these decisions since I hate SPAM as much as anyone. On the other hand, I've had three people on Yahoo complain over the past 30 days. I'm glad I finally found this post.

 

Anyone that wants to reject the yahoo domain can do that at their local level, right? Then we can whitelist from there?