Mailing List Message #7179
From: Joseph D'Andrea <>
Subject: Re: WARNING about spamCOP
Date: Tue, 21 Nov 2000 16:03:36 -0500
To: SIMS Discussions <>
At 12:51 PM -0800 11/21/00, Ron Risley wrote:
At 14:57 -0500 11/21/00, Joseph D'Andrea opined:
Only trouble is SpamCop reported to the admin of that one of their servers was involved in the transmission of spam. It took me 2 hours to explain to the idiots in their tech support dept about how to read the headers and how this was an error on the part of spamcop.

I'm not sure I'd characterize this as an error on SpamCop's part. The mail *was* relayed through, and there isn't any way to tell from the mail headers that it wasn't an open relay.

Yeah... that's why I'm warning everyone. If you report a spam message that you receive at one of your valid e-mail addresses and it was relayed through one of your own SMTP servers, SpamCOP will report you as a spammer even though the transfer was legit.

Also, it is my (admittedly limited) understanding that, by default, SpamCop wouldn't have notified the admin of; instead, it would notify ORBS that the server was a *possible* open relay. ORBS would then automatically test the server, and only if it *was* an open relay would ORBS notify the admin. So, unless you changed the SpamCop defaults, or unless SIMS is actually an open relay, your admin wouldn't have gotten the notice.

SpamCOP does report to ORBS... but this server is not an open relay. It accepted mail for one of it's domains and it forwarded it to the ultimate MTA for that domain. You can't relay through either of these MTAs.

SpamCOP did indeed report the "spam" to the ISP. I know this because they shut off my dial-up account and wouldn't turn it back on until I explained what happened to three different people.


Joseph D'Andrea        Internet services for the 21st Century
