SpamCop FAQ

SpamCop Parsing and Reporting Service

Parsing and reporting spam with SpamCop - decisions, problems

SpamCop has become more and more strict over the years about the formatting of spam. Although SpamCop is very tolerant of formatting errors and formatting tricks produced by spammers, it has also grown less and less tolerant of errors introduced by users after the spam is received.

Recently (Aug, 2003), SpamCop has been updated to do much more precise scanning of message bodies. At the same time, it has become more strict about how headers are submitted by users.

To help users who do not have compatible email software, SpamCop now includes a work-around, dubbed the "outlook/eudora workaround". By clicking this option below the website submission form, users can select a two-part submission system which will fix up the submission as much as possible before accepting it.

For users of Outlook who want an even easier solution, consider one of the 3rd party add-ons. Please note that none of these options actually provides full content for SpamCop. Our best information at the moment is that Outlook discards information when it retrieves your email.

What follows is a detailed description of the problem, read on if you are interested.

One common pitfall that still seems to be prevalent is erroneous wrapping of long email header lines being submitted to SpamCop. If this type of problem is present in submitted spam, SpamCop will refuse to scan the message body for links, instead producing an error.

An example:

Note the sections in red - these are long header lines which have been wrapped incorrectly post-receipt. Had they been sent by the spammer in this format, the message would never even show up correctly in the recipient's message window. SpamCop uses exactly the same system for interpreting messages, so it cannot see messages which have been "mangled" this way either.

In contrast, the correct formatting of the above headers would be:

Note how the long lines have been indented properly, so that software interpreting the headers can tell that the second part is a continuation of the first part.

When messages are received, these long lines are either actually all on one line, or they are broken and indented properly. However, when copying messages to SpamCop, long lines can often be corrupted, so they appear to be two separate lines. This causes problems, and should be avoided.

I cannot emphasize enough that this is not a trick by spammers to "fool spamcop". It is an error introduced by the recipient (you) when copying or submitting email to spamcop. If you encounter this problem, please review how you submit spam to SpamCop and take corrective action. Please don't just "fix up" the headers, but actually find a way to submit them unaltered in the first place. Fixing headers by hand only introduces even more fatal errors, not to mention being a big pain.

The best way to submit spam to SpamCop is by forwarding it as an attachment to your unique submission address - shown above the submission form on your personal start page.
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