Hi all, We've been using Spamcop (http://www.spamcop.net) for... well... ever since I last discuss this on the Debian-ISP mailing list a long while back.
We chose to go with Spamcop because of it's "democratic" voting system, in which a number of people would have to send in a spam report (containing a particular mail server's IP) before that IP would be listed in the spamcop RBL. It certainly isn't a perfect system, but it's all we could find that offered that kind of "voting" system. We are now looking for another similar system to supplement it. (http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=64558 has a discussion on Spamcop, SPEWS, and others by fellow ISPs and hosting companies. I found this while looking for another Spamcop-like service). We view Spamcop's "voting" system as a better way of doing things, as opposed to RBLs that arbitrarily list IPs and netblocks, without a clear or reasonable listing policy (think SPEWS and others). Since we are in Asia, and many lists actually block most of Asia (Korea, China, Hong Kong, etc.) we actually can't use many of these lists, or we'd be blocking ourselves. Many of these lists also block without actually ever receiving spam from them, and since many of our customers are also within Asia, and send most of their email to other users within Asia, obviously a lot of legitimate email gets blocked if we used those "arbitrary" lists; the collateral damage rate is way too high. While many of these lists would be fine for users and/or ISPs in the USA that communicate very little or not at all with Asia, for us this has become an increasingly big problem. On one hand... yes... many USA spammers abuse Asian servers to send out emails, so we do not want to see this spam. On the other hand, as mentioned above many of our users need to send email to and from Asia. Again, we can't use arbitrary lists like SPEWS and others because they block too much of Asia to be useful for legitimate emails to/from Asia. China is becoming an increasingly important country to communicate with (yeah... people predict they will be the next "world power" since the former Russia's downfall, but thats for another discussion), and at the same time we want to reduce spam. I am sure since you are ISPs as well, you may have considered this, and perhaps already thought of a workaround or solution, since an increasing number of your users would want to receive and send legitimate email to users in Asia. With all the above said, what do you guys suggest? Please... no flame wars or anything like that... I am sure we would all like to avoid that. I view this as a very serious problem... not just because we can't find any reasonable lists except for Spamcop (and we don't want to rely on them entirely... or we'd be giving them absolute control of our email) that don't block off large chunks of Asia, but also because this is creating a huge rift/wall between users in Asia and everywhere else (eg. USA). As fellow ISPs and hosting companies, we are in the best position to shape the future of things to come. Sincerely, Jason http://www.zentek-international.com (btw. we have looked at Razor... but it seems that some users are submitting things like Debian-ISP mails into it, and causing similar trouble)
