SpamCop -- your defender against spam and viruses
Written: Sep 30 '03 (Updated Dec 22 '03)
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Pros: Good, inexpensive virus and spam filtering mailbox.
Cons: User-adjustible spam filters only look at headers.
The Bottom Line: SpamCop saved my bacon (or at least, my E-mailbox) from SWEN. It can help you, too, if your MSP is uncooperative or has a low quota.
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| Arthur.Rubin's Full Review: spamcop |
It's only because of SpamCop that I'm able to keep my E-mail address public, so listen up.
You may recall that, about a week ago, my Email address become unusable because I was picking up enough copies of the SWEN virus to fill up my 10MB quota within 2 hours. Earthlink not being willing to filter viruses (or much spam, for that matter), I was forced to seek other alternatives.
The service I'm using at SpamCop is a an E-mail address (@spamcop.net, although they offer @cesmail.net) which removes virus-infected E-mail and moves (what it considers) spam into a Held Mail folder, leaving a virtually spam-free Inbox. I haven't seen any sign of a quota, but held mail is only kept for 2 weeks, and it's possible the Inbox is only kept for 2 weeks as well. So far, I've only had 3 messages which were NOT spam held as spam, and it's fairly simple (using the webmail interface) to move messages and adjust options.
UpdateI've had more messages from real people and groups posted as spam, but, so far, they've been easy to find by scanning the Held Mail mailbox. AOL's tendency to send E-mails both in HTML and plain text, and the fact that there isn't a "real name" in the headers, provides almost enough spam factors for the default setting of SpamAssassin to flag most such messages. You may need to raise the SpamAssassin level from 5 to 6 if you have many AOL corresponents.
Topical help files are of only marginal utility, but FAQs and message boards are quite good.
Details
Cost is $30/year (choice of PayPal or a secure credit card service (with a $1 surcharge) or virtual check service), with a 50% discount for up to three family members living at the same address.
You choose an E-mail address on their server, and either just use the address (it's rumored that spammers remove spamcop.net addresses from their lists); set your regular MSP ((E)Mail Service Provider) to autoforward your mail to the new address (my present choice); or tell SpamCop to access your mail through your regular MSP's POP server (I did test this, but I don't think Earthlink allows POP access and net access from different places at the same time, so it may not be a good choice unless you're sure your ISP does). (There is a kludge so you can filter AOL, MSN, or hotmail accounts, but I don't know if AOL and Microsoft are trying to block them, and I don't have any of those accounts....)
You can read your mail using the webmail interface at http://webmail.spamcop.net; by pointing your regular mailreader to their POP server (reads the Inbox only, of course), or by autoforwarding the filtered Inbox to another account. (No, you can't pick up the mail from one account, filter it, and send it back to that account. But who needs to?)
Additional configuration, including creating new folders on the server, moving messages between folders, whitelists (domains, subdomains, or addresses from which you want to receive mail even if it IS spam -- for example, your employer), blacklists (microsoft.com -- well, it would have stopped MS Blaster), choice of IP filters, and adjustment of the spam cutoff (see below) are easy to set up through the web interface.
Minor problems
As the spam filters only use the E-mail headers, you can't reject disinfected copies of SWEN, which now constitute about 80% of my remaining E-mail (by number of messages) -- nor can you reject completely blank messages. (I know, the last is only a minor annoyance.)
Update I found I was mistaken. Let me go into more details about the filtering process, to explain. As I see it, the filtering process works as follows (or, at least, as if it worked like this):
1. Virus filter: Messages with viruses are dumped into the bit bucket. You can't look at them, even you were a virus researcher.
2. Whitelist/Blacklist processing. Messages where the appropriate headers are on your whitelist are sent to the Inbox, and on your blacklist are sent to another folder.
3. IP filtering Messages from known spamming IPs are sent to Held Mail. (You have a choice of which services' lists to consider "known".)
4. SpamAssassin filtering This filter does use the content of the message, as well as the headers, to produce a numeric score. I once saw a score of 38.2. If the score exceeds your spam cutoff level (default 5), the message is
sent to Held Mail; otherwise to Inbox.
So, it's not quite correct to state (as I did before) that the filters only look at the headers.
End Update
You can't set whitelist/blacklist priorities, so that if you want to whitelist mysite.myemployer.com but blacklist bulkmail@mysite.myemployer.com, results are uncertain.
If your regular MSP is on spamcop's IP blacklist (bl.spamcop.net), or another selected IP blacklist, obviously all messages will go to the spam folder. (No, I don't think hotmail is on the list, although it would be tempting.)
Recommended:
Yes
Method of Access: Accessible through the Internet
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Epinions.com ID:
Arthur.Rubin
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Member: Arthur Rubin
Location: Brea, CA, USA
Reviews written: 97
Trusted by: 109 members
About Me:
Expert in mathematics, computers, income tax, with a wide variety of interests.
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