Spamcop
Spamcop has been around for a while but I have only recently started using it myself and have been very impressed with its performance in ridding my mailbox of junk mail. I would strongly recommend everyone who suffers from junk mail, to use this service to filter their mail. Here's why:
Conventional mail filters
It seems that internet service providers' mail filtering effectiveness
varies greatly from one to the next. And the amount of control the end user
has over the filters is sometimes good, and other times very limited. Recently
the biggest problem seems to be the amount of spam that comes via "bot
nets" - networks
of spammer-hijacked computers (see this
BBC link for more details). Often
the "spam
score" of
the content of
these junk messages is low, so SpamAssassin and
the other packages that ISPs use to filter it out, miss them. Filters need
to be able to accurately identify bot nets, so spam is filtered based
on the source or route taken to get to you.
Check out the Spamhaus list of top 10 dodgiest networks for spam - you'll see the same old ISPs on that list time after time. Filtering based purely on message content doesn't work so well as spammers are ever more inventive about disguising their wares in graphics, "captcha-style" writing, and by obfuscating the content with poetry and literary extracts. If your ISP isn't using an up-to-date list of bot nets (and many don't) then the back-stop fails and it all ends up in your mailbox.
How Spamcop differs
SpamCop streamlines
the process of determining the origin of spam and reporting it to the
ISP responsible for sending it, aiming to eliminate junk at source. The
data it gathers also builds up the SpamCop
Blocking List, which is one
of the lists ISPs can use to filter customers' mail. But the best bit
is that for an annual SpamCop fee of about £15, you can also have
SpamCop handle all of
your mail. You can still keep your existing email address(es) @yourdomainname
or @yourisp. You just set your mail system to forward everything
to your SpamCop mailbox, rather than collecting it from your normal POP3
servers. SpamCop will filter out all the junk to a "Held
Mail" folder, which you can check via your browser.
Next to every
message in here, is a check box to "report as spam". Using this,
you can ask SpamCop to analyse the junk email and send a properly formatted
response to the
"abuse" address of the originating ISP. It's only through such
reports being made that these ISPs in countries such as China and Korea
can be made aware of the problem and can take action to close spammers'
accounts. As you might expect from a filtering service based at "Spam
Central", it is stunningly accurate - a few do still get through,
but not many. Everything else is held in an inbox which you can either
read in a browser, or you can set your Outlook or other mail reader to
fetch your mail from there. This single collection point also makes it
easier for you to collect spam-free mail on the move, via your laptop
or PDA. Ask for more details about setting up your SpamCop account.
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