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Pete Stephenson | 18 Jul 21:37
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It's been a while...

Greetings SpamCop Digest reader,

It's been many months since the last SpamCop Digest was published. 
This was due partially to me being lazy, coupled with me joining the 
US Army and having to go off for training from January until June. 
Now that I've returned, the list should be a bit more active.

I'm going to start off with two articles, relating to spam, from Spamhaus.org:

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* The Spam Definition and Legalization Game
http://www.spamhaus.org/newsdog.lasso?article=116
The word Spam means "Unsolicited Bulk Email". Unsolicited means that 
the Recipient has not granted verifiable permission for the message 
to be sent. Bulk means that the message is sent as part of a larger 
collection of messages, all having substantively identical content. 
But ask a spammer and he'll claim spam is something else.

* United States Heads Towards Legalization of Spam
http://www.spamhaus.org/newsdog.lasso?article=117
With all of Europe set to implement Opt-in legislation by October, 
Europe has taken the lead in banning spam and is no longer waiting 
for the United States to stop the huge American spam problem, problem 
that most of Europe suffers from with over 90% of all spam hitting 
Europe being sent by American (mostly Florida-based) spammers.

But the United States is going in the opposite direction to Europe 
and is now set to explode the spam problem far worse than it is 
today, incredibly by actually legalizing Unsolicited Bulk Email 
instead of banning it.
(Continue reading)

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Pete Stephenson | 23 Jul 11:51
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Using SpamAssassin to detect and sort spam.

Greetings again,

In this edition of the SpamCop Digest, I will discuss the use of the 
free spam filter called SpamAssassin[1] to detect and sort spam.

While I believe it's safe to say that all subscribers of this mailing 
list are indeed quite frustrated about receiving spam, and most 
report most if not all of the spam they receive via SpamCop. Overall, 
I believe that anti-spammers will win, and that spam will no longer 
be tolerated anywhere on the internet. However, while we're waiting 
for that day, we still have to deal with the huge volume of spam we 
receive daily (I generally receive anywhere between 50 and 200 spams 
per day, with it varying randomly every day).

Many of us get spam at our work email accounts in addition to our 
personal accounts, and many businesses are fearful of implementing 
server-side filtering because they fear it might result in 
false-positives and blocking of legitimate mail, which, for a 
business, would be intolerable (and reasonably so). Since employers 
hesitate to block spam and implement filters, our accounts receive 
more spam, and more of our work time is being spent dealing with 
spam[2].

Enter SpamAssassin. In it's native form, it's a free, open-source 
UNIX program, though it's been ported to Windows and other platforms, 
and people have created commercial versions[3]. It performs a wide 
variety of heuristic checks on the headers and body text of mail in 
order to detect spam.

Many filters out there aren't very effective, as they either have
(Continue reading)

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Pete Stephenson | 23 Jul 22:45
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[CORRECTION] Using SpamAssassin to detect and sort spam.

In the last SpamCop Digest, I made an error. I had said the following:
>SpamCop has been experimenting[5] with using SpamAssassin as an 
>optional filter for paying subscribers. JT's still in the process of 
>testing it out, and it's defaulting "off" on all accounts, though 
>you can turn it on if you wish via the webmail interface. When it's 
>out of testing, and placed fully into production, there'll be an 
>announcement.

I had failed to recall a message that was sent to all users, posted 
to the SpamCop Forum, and mentioned on the "news" page. SpamAssassin 
support with SpamCop is no longer being tested -- it's in production. 
Paid users with SpamCop mail accounts can access it by logging into 
the webmail system, going to "Options", selecting "SpamCop Tools", 
and selecting "Select your email filtering blacklists."

I would also like to clarify that I was not suggested that 
SpamAssassin in any way replace SpamCop, or make it less effective. 
On the contrary,I was suggesting that people use SpamAssassin (or 
many of the other similar filtering products that people sent me 
emails about) in order to enhance their spam-fighting experience (by 
filtering out junk from your mailbox, it allows you to deal with 
legitimate mail now, and spam when it's convienient for you). 
Obviously, I strongly encourage everyone to report all spam they 
receive, because otherwise there's no way that the spam will actually 
stop.

We must hold the spammer's feet to the fire, and make spamming more 
difficult and less profitable for them in order to stop the spam. 
Filtering is merely a stop-gap measure to make email a bit more 
usable, but we must continue to report spam in order to lessen it.
(Continue reading)

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