--On Monday, December 06, 2004 09:34 +0100 Adrian 'Dagurashibanipal' von Bidder <avbidder@fortytwo.ch> wrote:
Various AOL mailservers, the Debian mailservers, and other servers sending out lots of regular mail get listed in spamcop regularly, so my recommendation (and that of spamcop.net themselves, btw) is not to use bl.spamcop.net for blacklisting. Use it in spamassassin to score points.
Sorry about double replies, but also, you have to remember we're an ISP, not a small shop. By doing this we cut our incoming mail in *HALF* or less. That's because there is that much spam out there. Spamcop is fair, well run, and FULLY dynamic. Not subjet to human policies, or delay in listing, or unlisting. They are also not subject to arbitrary policy decisions that many of the other lists are subject to because they are automated. And because it is based on submitted spam, seen email, and honeypots or traps it is very accurate, far more so than many of the others, with far less collateral damage.
When you're handling LOTS of email every day, we're in excess of about 3/4 a million envelopes a day, and far more recipients than that -- and that's just the main mail servers, doesn't include the Mailman server, you're going to do everything you can to not have to handle total junk, and to keep SA, and virus scanning, two VERY expensive processes, from hitting the email. We estimate we'd roughly have to double the amount of mail servers just in order to handle the SPAM that nobody wants.
I'm sorry, but for us the tiny amount of collateral damage, is perfectly acceptable. Metrics have it at, and probably far below, 1%. If a false positive is encountered the 4xx code will cause the legitimate mailservers to just retry later, and usually the length of time that they're retry is more than adequate to get them unlisted IF the administrators are responsive to their SPAM problem.