FC: Spamcop again blocks legit site, reportedly takes out Tucows

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

[Tucows is a domain name registrar that became famous in the 1990s by 
offering freeware/shareware downloads. The danger here is not that Spamcop 
is violating its own rules; it almost certainly is not. Its procedures, as 
I understand them, allow incorrect or malicious allegations of spam to 
place a site on the Spamcop blacklist. This is not a mistake: Spamcop was 
intentionally designed to have a hair-trigger better-safe-than-sorry 
reporting system. That makes it terribly prone to abuse, and Spamcop knows 
it. Spamcop's designers should have the right to sell such a flawed system, 
but the rest of us don't need to use it and should advise others against 
it. --Declan]

---

Date: Thu, 6 Mar 2003 13:34:30 -0500 (EST)
From: Joe Baptista <baptista () dot-god com>
To: Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>
Subject: SpamCop (fwd)


Declan - looks like spamcop blacklisted tucows.

Joe Baptista - only at www.baptista.god

                      www.baptista.god
                     yours to discover

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 6 Mar 2003 12:01:35 -0500
From: Edward Gray <egray () tucows com>
To: discuss-list () opensrs org
Subject: SpamCop

Early this morning the opensrs mail system that is used for sending OpenSRS
domain renewal notifications was
blacklisted by SpamCop.

This has happened several times in the past specifically with SpamCop. This
occurs because a registrant receives the renewal notice and in error, flags
it as a Spam message with SpamCop. We are required to send at least 2
renewal notices to the owner of every domain as per the ICANN Registrar
Accreditation Agreement.

The duration that the blacklist will remain active is difficult to determine
but the longest we have remained blacklisted so far is approximately 19
hours with some of the events lasting a 1-2 hours.

Edward Gray
Director, Operations & Networks
Tucows Inc.
egray () tucows com




-------------------------------------------------------------------------
POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list
You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice.
To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html
This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/
Like Politech? Make a donation here: http://www.politechbot.com/donate/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------