Does SC reporting lead to more SPAM?

[kevvyb]

Is it likely that reporting SPAM using SPAMCop will result in more SPAM. And how do I stop this? SPAM cop reporting is not checked but one of my spam emails was reported this evening.

Thanks

[stan_qaz]

I've been using spamcop with MW for many years now and have never had a message reported to spamcop that didn't have the spamcop report box ticked on so I can't tell you how or why that happened, I don't recall its being reported by others either.

Keeping from getting more spam by reporting to spamcop is a topic of longstanding discussion on the spamcop.net newsgroups and more recently on their forums so I'd suggest you go there for a more in depth treatment of it. I'll hit the high points here and that may be good enough.

Normal reporting provides your e-mail address to the ISPs hosting the spammer or his bots and the spammer's websites, normally that is a good thing as it helps the ISPs and hosting companies clean out the spammer. Once in a while the spammer will be given access to your address, usually that is good too as the spammer will remove you from his list to keep from being reported again. Very rarely the spammer will hit you with a bunch of spam, with MW that is good too as you can report the lot of it and get the spammer added to the blocklist and folks running his bots told to clean their computers. I had one spammer sending me thousands of spams for a couple days until he realized the problem he was causing himself. With MW it was no real hassle to report every spam so I was happy to help the spammer hurt himself.

If you do not want to share your address you can opt to have it obscured in your reports, the only downside is that some ISPs refuse to act on altered reports and will ignore your report.

Bottom of the heap and about worthless is mole reporting where your reports are only used to feed the blocklist and are not reported on to the hosting companies. It really doesn't accomplish much but it is there for folks that want it.

A slightly different option many users do not know about is Quick Mode reporting where an established spam reporter can dispense with having to go through the confirmation web page for each report. That is much faster but skips the notification of the website host, not a bad thing if you get a lot of spam and want to do less work reporting it.

Spamcop.net main page and FAQ links: http://www.spamcop.net/

Spamcop.net forums: http://forum.spamcop.net/forums/index.p ... 6a&act=idx

Spamcop Wiki: http://forum.spamcop.net/scwik/SpamCopWikiHome

[kevvyb]

Hi

Thanks for that but when I say items have been reported what I mean is when I look in the recycle bin there are some SPAM emails that have been marked as reported but I do not know how this has happened.

[stan_qaz]

If they were reported to Spamcop you would know as it would have shown up on your spamcop account and you would have had to confirm the report there or canceled it. If you open your spamcop.net account you should be able to pull up your past reports and match them up with the messages in MW fairly easily.

Are you sure it isn't talking about reporting to FirstAlert? There is no confirmation web page involved with that so the logging is your confirmation that the report was made.

[kevvyb]

That's not ticked either...... I don't know how this happened as I avoid it altogether

[stan_qaz]

Why not go to your display options screen and remove the columns for FA and Spamcop, you might have to disable the tools to do it, so there is no chance of reporting being done.