On Fri, 4 Jan 2002 17:57:39 -0800 Dan Wilder <dan@ssc.com> wrote:

Wondering if you're also testing SpamCop, http://www.spamcop.com.

Nope. I was rather steered off it by being on the annoying receiving end of its alerts and bounces (some of the users of the local Linux UG use it). That pretty well nixed any further interest from me.

I haven't evaluated it, but I'm afraid I've a bit of a bone to pick with it. False positives are not unknown. Worse, it sends automatic anonymous complaints to upstream providers of anybody even mentioned in the putative spam.

Sounds astonishingly familiar.

Yet another. "Forgot my password" on our Mailman lists apparently trips at some SpamCop content filter; I've fielded at least one spam auto-complaint thus generated.

Aye. One of the razor problems is people registering Mailman password reminders as SPAM, tho the best I saw was a comp.risks digest getting Razored....

The SpamCop site has verbiage implying that a mailing list had better be able to prove it is double-opt-in, and had better maintain proof of opt-in for each individual subscriber, or else. The "or else" isn't specified, but apparently Mr. Haight has had some record of success in arranging loss of internet connectivity. No doubt some of those affected have been actual spammers, but with one man serving as judge, jury, and executioner, I'm afraid I don't see much about this effort to reassure the rest of us.

<shrug>

They're short lived phenomena.

-- J C Lawrence
---------(*) Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. claw@kanga.nu He lived as a devil, eh?
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/ Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.