Friday, July 6, 2012

SpamCop.net goes FUBAR

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If you're an avid SpamCop.net user, as I am, you are not alone if you have found their website to have gone FUBAR. From reading the SpamCop Discussion forum, this problem has been intermittent since June 14, 2012. Apparently I have been lucky logging in and reporting until today. At this point I find it 100% impossible to report spam via the website. A variety of errors are being thrown. I can occasionally log into the main page but cannot log into the forum, which makes no sense.

Thankfully, I verified that the email method of submitting spam is working perfectly at this time. Each verified account has its own email address it can use for submissions.

I'd like to say the problem was being caused by a DDOS attack from some SpamBot network. That's easy to solve. But there is no sign at this point of that being the problem. IMHO they have hosed their server and don't have an adequate backup to restore it again. IOW, IMHO, FGS!, they broke the #1 Rule Of Computing. It doesn't get any worse. I.E. not good.

It is particularly disturbing to me that SpamCop has not publicly acknowledged this problem. There is no official announcement anywhere on the site. That means they're freaked, have no solution, and/or are too embarrassed to admit the situation. I.E. not good.

I'm sure the SpamRats are having a party. SpamCop remains a primary source of free spam blacklist data to the world. Enjoy the party while it lasts little SpamRats. We have other methods of spam reporting up our vigilant sleeves. Darn! :-P

As the SpamCop.net problem evolves, I will be reporting here.
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2 comments:

  1. I don't think it's a scenario backups would help with - when you can get to it, the server does actually process spam OK, it's just seldom reachable now with various timeouts.

    The vague admin comments I've seen point to a DDoS, and the symptoms seem to fit with the system being choked up with junk - including the recent reports of 2+ hour delays in processing emailed submissions.

    Given their Cisco ownership, I can imagine extra caution around any embarrassing network problems - and having had all kinds of problems with the Cisco kit at work, it wouldn't surprise me at all to find that implicated in some way. I'm looking forward to finding out more, though!

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  2. Avid daily user of SpamCop.net here. I have always forwarded my 'spam bundle' to SpamCop.net and received a response from their site in 60 seconds or less. The last couple of weeks have seen 24 hour turnarounds with MANY rejections because the Spam was too old.

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