SpamCop is an
email spam
Email spam, also referred to as junk email, spam mail, or simply spam, refers to unsolicited messages sent in bulk via email. The term originates from a Spam (Monty Python), Monty Python sketch, where the name of a canned meat product, "Spam (food ...
reporting service, allowing recipients of unsolicited bulk or commercial email to report IP addresses found by SpamCop's analysis to be senders of the spam to the abuse reporting addresses of those IP addresses. SpamCop uses these reports to compile a
list of computers sending spam called the "SpamCop Blocking List" or "SpamCop Blacklist" (SCBL).
History
SpamCop was founded by Julian Haight in 1998 as an individual effort. As the reporting service became more popular, staff were added and the SCBL became more useful. It has commonly been the target of
DDoS
In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyberattack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host co ...
attacks and
lawsuit
A lawsuit is a proceeding by one or more parties (the plaintiff or claimant) against one or more parties (the defendant) in a civil court of law. The archaic term "suit in law" is found in only a small number of laws still in effect today ...
s from organizations listed in the SCBL.
Email security company
IronPort Systems announced its acquisition of SpamCop on November 24, 2003, but it remained independently run by Julian Haight. A small staff and volunteer help in its forum.
IronPort agreed to become a division of
Cisco Systems
Cisco Systems, Inc. (using the trademark Cisco) is an American multinational corporation, multinational digital communications technology conglomerate (company), conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develops, m ...
on January 4, 2007, effectively making SpamCop a Cisco service. Julian Haight left approximately two years after the Cisco acquisition.
SpamCop views itself as an attempt to stop spam without the necessity of governmental intervention, but because it lacks the power of a government or large ISP, it may have greater difficulty dealing with spammers' expertise as well as the large
bot networks that they control and that they used to cripple
Blue Security with a massive
DDoS
In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyberattack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host co ...
attack.
SpamCop previously provided paid email accounts through Corporate Email Services (CES). On August 9, 2014, in an email to email account holders, CES announced that "
of September 30, 2014 (Tuesday) 6pm ET, the current SpamCop Email service will be converted to email forwarding-only with spam filtered by SpamCop for all existing SpamCop Email users" and that "SpamCop will no longer provide IMAP or POP service
fter that date"
As of 10:31:56 UTC on 31 January 2021, the domain and all sub-domains of spamcop.net resolved to a domain parking service due to the domain being expired. Later that day the domain was renewed and the service was again running. The outage resulted in messages being rejected due to the blacklist DNS entries all directing to the domain parking service.
See also
*
*
Blue Frog
*
E-mail spam
Email spam, also referred to as junk email, spam mail, or simply spam, refers to unsolicited messages sent in bulk via email. The term originates from a Monty Python sketch, where the name of a canned meat product, "Spam," is used repetitively, m ...
*
List poisoning
*
Sam Spade (software)
*
Spam (electronic)
Spamming is the use of messaging systems to send multiple unsolicited messages (spam) to large numbers of recipients for the purpose of commercial advertising, non-commercial proselytizing, or any prohibited purpose (especially phishing), or sim ...
*
The Spamhaus Project
The Spamhaus Project is an international organisation based in the Principality of Andorra, founded in 1998 by Steve Linford to track email spammers and spam-related activity. The name ''spamhaus'', a pseudo-German expression, was coined by Li ...
References
External links
SpamCop Official site(Note: There are copycat sites at similar URLs with other
TLD
A top-level domain (TLD) is one of the domain name, domains at the highest level in the hierarchical Domain Name System of the Internet after the root domain. The top-level domain names are installed in the DNS root zone, root zone of the nam ...
s.)
SpamCop Forumsand
ews://news.spamcop.net/spamcop newsgroupsSCBL dispute resolutionfrom th
* Th
SURBLis an RBL based on SpamCop data to block or tag spam based on URIs contained within the message body.
{{spamming
Internet Protocol based network software
IronPort
Spamming