4:35 pm admin

Spam cop is a 3rd party “spam reporting” service operated by IronPort systems.

In order to understand Spam Cop, you need to understand how it actually works and why it’s causing your email messages to get blocked.

At the very heart of the Spam Cop system is a sophisticated “parser” which looks at your email headers. Email headers include a lot of the information about your emails that the ISPs use to determine how to classify your email messages. In other words, whether or not your emails are going to wind up in the inbox, spam folder, or lost somewhere in cyberspace!

People subscribe to the Spam Cop service and simply send objectionable emails as attachments to a unique address.

THEN, Spam Cop analyzes the message.

First, it looks to find out where the email is coming from. It finds the IP address and then does a “whois” lookup. Once it identifies the IP address, it compares it to Spam Cop’s existing database to find out if the contact is valid.

Once that step is done, the next thing that Spam Cop looks for are hyperlinks. It strips out the domain and looks it up at abuse.net. (Abuse.net is a registry of mostly voluntarily-supplied email contacts to report misuse for web domains.

The person submitting the “complaint,” if you will, then goes through the review process. They review the subject of the message, along with some lines of the body text, in order to confirm the email is unwanted – and to reduce the chances of accidentally reporting the wrong message.

If the user confirms that they do want to report this message as spam, they simply click a link and the report is sent to all the parties in the channel. In other words, this report goes to your hosting company (assuming you are using a self-hosted email solution), your email provider (if you’re using a 3rd party email solution), and so on.

How those recipients act on this report will be determined by their individual policies.

The biggest problem with Spam Cop reports is that the subscriber that reports the message as spam is never provided to you, so you can’t remove them from your list in the future.

Author: Heather Seitz

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This information has been provided by http://www.EmailDelivered.com and written by Heather Seitz. To learn more about Spam Cop, visit http://www.emaildelivered.com/spam/what-is-spam-cop/. Don’t forget to sign up for the EmailDelivered Pulse newsletter for articles, tips, and recommended resources related to email marketing and email deliverability.

June 6, 2012