[UK-CONTEST] 'Weird' happenings: Spamcop

[Ian White, G3SEK]

Tim wrote:
>G3VAO asked
>> Is there a problem with uk.contest or have I got crossed fingers (again)?
>
>No to both! All the contesting.com reflectors use a product called 
>Spamcop to reduce the amount of unsolicited mail that gets sent to the 
>reflectors. This works on a 'blacklist' of mailservers which have been 
>seen forwarding unsolicited mail.
>
>Some months ago, the BT mailservers got blacklisted for a few days. 
>Now, the Freeserve ones have. Anyone trying to post from a Freeserve 
>account may have problems from time to time (not all the servers may be 
>blacklisted)
>
SpamCop is notoriously trigger-happy. If someone uses your ISP to send 
spam, the ISP cannot throw them off until after the offence has been 
committed (rather obviously). But if any spam escapes and comes to the 
notice of SpamCop, it will blacklist the outgoing mail server that was 
used to send it.

The problem (again obviously) is that the same bank of outgoing servers 
is shared by all of that ISP's customers, including you and me. If any 
of your mail to SpamCop customers - such as these reflectors - happens 
to be routed through the blacklisted server, it will get bounced. If it 
happened to use a different server, it will go through.

>The Spamcop blacklist is dynamic and it's probable that the affected 
>servers will drop off the list as the ISP takes measures to stop the 
>abuse on their servers

It will time out automatically after a few days.

As an innocent party, all you see is weird mail behaviour. After you've 
wasted enough time to understand what's going on, it sorts itself out... 
but there is no guarantee that it won't be back.

In fairness to SpamCop, they do recognise this problem. They provide a 
"whitelist" service so that customers can nominate a list of addresses 
from which mail should always be accepted, regardless of the status of 
their ISP. I don't know how many contesting.com list managers use this, 
but clearly some don't.

>As for the weird mails that others have been receiving - this is almost 
>certainly down to the Bugbear virus which is taking the world by storm 
>at the moment.
>
Virus storms are generating most of the mail weirdness at the moment... 
but I do wish that SpamCop wasn't contributing too.


>Keep your shields up!

-- 
73 from Ian G3SEK         'In Practice' columnist for RadCom (RSGB)
                            Editor, 'The VHF/UHF DX Book'
http://www.ifwtech.co.uk/g3sek