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Trouble Getting to SpamCop?
geekwench writes "SpamCop was apparently the victim of a recent DoS attack. A false complaint to their domain registrar led to all primary DNS information being pulled. The problem is now fixed, but there may still be access issues for the next couple of days as ISPs clear the old DNS information out of their caches. You can read about it here and here. (Sounds to me as if SpamCop is proving to be a good-sized thorn in the sides of a number of spammers.)"
Because of caching, sometimes some things resolve and some don't... so, if www.spamcop.net doesn't work, try spamcop.net minus the www. Of course, if your mail server can't resolve their mail server properly, then submitted spam is a much bigger pain.
Actually, SpamCop now uses SpamAssassin as well as its own blocklist. And I use it mainly for one-click accurate reporting through the 'held' web interface. You are right that most abuse desks don't care about SpamCop reports, but it's still worth it for the remaining doing their job.
Regarding Joker registrar policy wrt to validation procedures, I suppose that the fact that SpamCop goes away tells it all.
have you been defaced today?
spamhaus.org seems to be down. Probably being DDOS'd as well.
The google cache of the page is here but it's loading pretty slowly, so I'm not sure how much of the page info is actualy cached.
Not all 200 names on the list are from the USA, but American spammers do seem to be a large majority.
Network Associates is reporting an E variant that just came out of W32/Mimail that attacks the following domains:
. org
spews.org
spamhaus.org
spamcop.net
www.spews
www.spamhaus.org
www.spamcop.net
Here is the link to the description:
Link to W32/Mimail.e@mm description
This might explain some of the other issues folks mentioned above like getting to Spamhaus, etc... I saw a few instances of W32/Mimail.c@mm on Friday in my day job. That one launched DoS against darkprofits.net besides sending itself to everyone in an address book.
bbh
There is a new email worm called W32/Mimail-E that is designed to create a distributed denial of service attack on the anti-spam websites of spamcop, SPEWS, and spamhause. See: sophos write-up.
SPF support for most open source mail servers can be found at libspf2.
I work for an ISP and honestly, we love SpamCop. Our abuse mail gets a lot of complaints. We can take action on maybe 2% of them, because people simply don't give us enough information. "Stop sending me spam" does nothing for us, nor do the 75% of people who forward the spam and do not inlcude the headers. (Honestly, how can so many people still not know to include full headers when reporting spam?)
The SpamCop reports have ALL the information we need (timestamps with time zone are crucial) to track down a spammer and get them off our network. The other nice thing is that once all the SpamCop complaints are handled, we usually find that the few regular spam reports we can track were about the same people we just got done banning due to the SpamCop reports.
So, at least for us, SpamCop is very effective. Granted that's just one ISP, but there ya go.
WWJD?
JWRTFM!
Spamcop is great if the ISP or web host actually responds to the complaints. I work for a web hosting company and we investigate every complaint that comes in. If it's legit the account gets terminated.
I still think by the time spamcop gets to us it's too late though. You can't unsend spam, once it's out it's out. They'll just get a different account on another host. What we need is some kind of filtering on the incoming and outgoing sides. Or the world could just switch to something besides Outlook, which helps these viruses and worms propagate.
"A false complaint to their domain registrar led to all primary DNS information being pulled."
That's funny because a false complaint against us by spamcop led to all our servers being off the net for a day last year. They did ZERO research on the complaint and took it straight to our ISP (rather than trying to contact us by our abundant and up-to-date contact info available in our emails and on our websites). Their conduct was beyond reckless, it was vicious.
I'm all for good anti-spam but those guys can bite me. Serves them right IMHO.
closed minded is as closed minded does
Who needs SpamCop...s </A>.Its free, open source, and works almost as well as my Mailblocks account...
Just use <A href="http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/">SpamBaye