Help! Spamcop is blocking us! Why? Can AZC do something about it?

spamcop.net blocks an email server as soon as it gets a "verifiable" report. This is a quick fix, but the drawback is that if the party who reported an incident is not knowledgeable enough to distinguish whether or not they received a true spam, the victimized outgoing mail server could be blocked even though it was victimized in the first place.

In general, the customers of all ISPs (e.g. attglobal.net) share a cluster of mail servers operated by their ISPs. This is because it's simply not feasible to deploy a server for each customer for purely cost and logistical reasons. For virtual hosting, "your" mail server actually is an alias of the ISP's mail server cluster, so if your ISP's mail servers are blocked by spamcop.net, yours is too.

You may ask: "Can spamcop's blocking be done in a more intelligent way such as instead of blocking the whole mail server, just blocking it based on the domain name?"

The answer is a "qualified no". For one thing, blocking the IP of an mail server is simpler to implement, and less susceptable to email header forgeries. But, this approach always carries the risk of creating "false positives" (or "killing the innocent".)

Can AZC do anything about it? The answer is regretably a "no" too.

1. It's NOT at all mandatory to use AZC's mail server (aliased as smtp.yourdomain) to send your outgoing messages. Its use, as pointed out in the AZC online FAQ: "What is a viurtual host?", is strictly optional. You can always use your Internet access provider's mail server (e.g. attglobal.net) to send outgoing messages. This is particularly true if unfortunately AZC's mail servers are blocked by, say, spamcop.net.
2. No ISP can be immune from such unfortunate incidences, as ISPs by nature are unlikely to know their customers persoally. Furthermore, if a party who intends to spam sneaks into an ISP's user population, lays low for a while, and then starts a batch of spam when s/he sees fit, they can get a few thousand emails off without the ISP ever noticing!

   The best the ISP can do is to apply its Acceptable Use Policies (AUP) as soon as the spamming is discovered. But by then the damage is done!. Yes, such incidences make the ISP look bad, but we hope the above explainations gives you some insight of the difficult position AZC, or any ISP, is in.

Regretably, spamcop.net has this policy that it's quick to block, but slow (one week in general) to unblock. So, the quickest way to get around spamcop.net's blocking is to use another email server. AZC is not affiliated with spamcop.net in any way, and has no influence whatsoever on its operation and blocking methodologies. We don't have control of which ISP may decide to use spamcop.net's blocking lists either. So, our suggestion above for now is the only way out if you MUST use email for communication. Don't forget you can also reach people via phone calls, fax, and postal mail! Not being able to send a message via email to somebody is not the end of the world!

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