Dear Sir/Madam,
The last few months some servers of the company i work for got on the SpamCop blacklist for sending e-mail to traps of SpamCop.
Without notification (except for the reports to my ISP Account) or any evidence at all, the servers got blacklisted.
After 24 hours, the servers were removed again, but the source remained unknown to me, i never saw any headers. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack for me.
I work with systems that process over 10.000 e-mails per hour, and i know that my spamfilters do not detect everything, so once in a while some spam slips through my filters. You simply can't detect spam with a accuracy of 100%.
I want to make clear that i find SpamCop a great initiative, but there are some things that are a bit annoying, like the spamtraps.
When my server gets listed i want to see wich e-mail was received at the trap so i can find out where it originated from so i can shut down accounts or take other actions.
At the moment i can't, my servers gets listed and i can't do a thing about it. In the meantime i can only hope that not another e-mail is sent to one of your traps.
Now i know that a lot of servers get listed because of bounces they sent, so i took some counteractions for that. My servers deny e-mail for recipeints who don't exist on SMTP-level, they don't sent bounces.
I know your policy about e-mail that is received in spamtraps, i quote from your website:
"System has sent mail to SpamCop spam traps in the past week (spam traps are secret, no reports or evidence are provided by SpamCop)"
I my opinion that is ridiculous, how can you expect sysadmins to block spam when they don't get any headers at all?
I know you policy won't change over night, but i hope it will change within a reasonable time.
Only giving the headers are enough, you can take out the "To" address and the mailserver that received the e-mail. In this way i can still track down the source and block it.
I will share this e-mail (and your reply) with some other Dutch ISP's, this is because we think the same about this.
Thank you in advance.
Yours sencerily,
Wido den Hollander
PCextreme B.V.