[Coco] Re: Reporting SPAM

[John E. Malmberg]

I recommend that anyone with a real interest please go to 
www.spamcop.net and go to the help forums.  They have help forums both 
web based and private news server based which you can browse or ask 
questions.

I could write some long stuff about what can be done about spam, but 
frankly, I have written it before here, and apparently it has been 
mostly ignored.

But if you do care, most of the significant stuff is in the FAQs in the 
spamcop.net forums.  Especially if you want a relatively spam free inbox 
with out having to use personal filters.

Now when evaluating anti-spam methods:

To my mind, a spam filter that silently deletes messages or hides them 
in a quarantine is useless.  The first case has a silent error rate, and 
in the second case, if it has a high enough error rate that I need to 
check the quarantine, it is useless, and if I am not checking the 
quarantine, then what errors it have are effectively silent.


If a real e-mail sent to either may qsl.net e-mail address or my 
encompasserve.org e-mail is misclassified as spam, the sender will get 
notified of non-delivery by their mail server, provided their mail 
server is set correctly.


My qsl.net e-mail address feeds into my encompasserve.org e-mail. 
Between the two widely harvested e-mail addresses.  Encompasserve is 
about 2 years behind state of the art in spam detection and is only 
using blocking lists, qsl.net is using unspecified aggressive spam 
detection.  For both combined, 5 spams out of 60 valid e-mails today, 
which seems to be about average lately.


Encompasserve (shell/imap) accounts are available for free signups, and 
Encompasserve is currently running totally on member donations which are 
currently averaging about $50 U.S. per member.

Encompasserve is not running in a fault tolerant configuration, but as a 
hobby, and typically seems to have about 2 or so brief outages per year, 
and I have been using them as my primary mail server operator for years.

-John
wb8tyw(at)qsl.net
malmberg(at)encompasserve.org