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SPAM - what is expiry.com doing to fight it? Print

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Question - We were notified today that the email server servicing our site has been blocked again by SpamCop. We were also unable to retrieve emails during this same period. Can you please describe the nature of the problem and the steps you are taking to resolve this issue?

Answer - Spamcop is one of a 100 spam monitoring block lists. They are legitimately blocking your site because the shared email server on my server has apparently sent them some spam in the last few hours. Their spam traps are dynamic and turn on and off on an hourly basis. All web hosts use a universal set of reference block lists as references of who to block but most of us don't block someone unless they are reported by more than one reference block list. You can see that we were apparently on one list today and clear on all of the others. At the moment we are clear at SpamCop. The email server receiving your emails  has chosen to block you because of SpamCop's  report  for some email sent by one of thousands of email accounts on this server and that email was probably innocently sent to a friend who is innocently blocking  emails for whatever reason that you and I will never know.

Bottom line - there isn't much we can do on my end other than constantly monitor it as we do daily. If we see a chronic spammer then we delete them from our server for violating our "Acceptable Abuse Policy".

Emails that bounce also bounce for up to 4 days so emails initially bounced by SpamCop will probably land in your email box within a day.

The only way to manage this better is to have your own dedicated email server without sharing it with anyone else. Even then I am certain , due to the intermittent service nature of normal email, that you would still continue to suffer from such deliverability problems that are common to the entire email authentication and screening process. All of this could easily be solved if one of 2 proposed standards were adopted by everyone. Microsoft and Sun Microsystems have excellent and competing solutions that no one can use because it doesn't suit their investor's best interests. Fighting SPAM is a big business that makes them lots of money.

You can see that we also actively use block lists and instruct all rejected email users in how to address it. http://www.expiry.com/blocked.html

Our system, that most servers use, is Spam Assassin and you'll find that commercial systems that promise miracles use exactly

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