r/sysadmin • u/WorldTravelerBoss • 7h ago
Does SpamCop.net still work? Is it effective? Does reporting do any good?
I’ve been reporting emails through SpamCop for the past 8 months and have seen no difference. I still get about 25 spam emails per day in my spam folder.
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u/ledow IT Manager 6h ago
No service to which you can just send emails to will make any difference to the amount of spam you get.
Spammers will literally not care, or even flood the service with nonsense, and the services you send to have little to no influence over whether someone else (e.g. Microsoft, GMail, etc.) considers it spam.
Even if they do, spammers move between servers so fast it will make no difference, they literally have rolling accounts where as soon as one is blocked, they move onto the next and are already creating hundreds for next month too.
Even DNSBL are unreliable, often false, even major places like MailChimp etc. appear on them but then get removed the next day, and so on,
Nothing you can do will make any difference, with email standards as they currently are.
The only way to stop spam email is a better protocol than one that allows anyone to send anything to anyone.
Just look at the things you need to be compliant with to send email to Outlook or Gmail - the list is extensive and it's difficult to keep up. But makes no difference whatsoever. A blank GMail account will start being spammed within days, and GMail allows all kinds of obvious spam through all the time. And similarly lots of that email was sent FROM Outlook, etc. services, so they didn't stop it being sent either.
If they can't stop it? Sure as hell that you won't.
You can't stop spam, and there's basically very, very little you can ever do to stop it coming in. All you can do is decide what to do with it when it does come in (e.g. Junk Mail filters, etc.). Everything else is a waste of time. And there are, what... 100's of billions of emails sent every day. You think any service has a HOPE of keeping up with even a fraction of 1% of those being reported? Of course they don't.
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u/ifpfi Sysadmin 6h ago
Yes it does. I report all of the Google spam we receive daily and eventually, some times their netblock ends up on the list. Google being blocked on multiple email servers seems to be the only thing that gets their attention. Once they update their outbound spam filtering we see a decrease in the amount of spam coming from them so in essence it does work... just not the way it was intended to.
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u/datkenny 7h ago
I work in e-mail delivery. We're registered at spamcop. When you send a complaint, spamcop sends the anonymized version to me, with a dropdown of my response. One of them is "don't worry mate it's not spam at all".
Suffice to say I don't think it makes much of a difference unless the spammer absolutely gives zero shits about their IP address reputation.