FUNKY FUDGE WOMAN - where are you?

[gazlannathai]

5 ranting emails swearing at me, threatening to remove me from this that and the other weren't enough to get my attention? Whatever, I can do public, gives the sharks something to feed on. I apologise for not being around at midnight last night to answer your emails immediately.

It was a complete ACCIDENT that your buildaskill email was caught by my spamcop trap and reported, your emails were actually whitelisted (not black listed) so they shouldn't even have been in there - I have been away and had some 5000+ spam emails which were held and reported by my spamcop account over a 3 week period - I don't have time to sit through that many spam emails, that's what I PAY spamcop to do. They have lists of known spammers and for whatever reason, you were transferred from whitelist to spammer. NOT my doing. I am suprised that it took only one spamcop report to get you shut down to be honest. On the flip side, at least I know they are actually doing something with my $30 per annum!

I have contacted spamcop and hopefully it will be sorted out as quickly as possible.

For the record, I don't appreciate you taking that tone with me - a simple "Mel, what have you done to me??" would have sufficed, rather than the round of "f*cks* I woke up to this morning.

As for removing me (from whatever you feel necessary) - feel free, I really don't have time at the moment.

Cocksparrer - For the record - the quality of Mel's fudge has never been in question - my Mum swears by it even though it clags up her dentures.



Mel - I want you to understand the seriousness of what your "simple mistake" has caused - and I would like anyone reading this to ponder for a moment on just how dangerous the SpamCop service is.

I own a very large chunk of website hosting space on which I host 3 ecommerce sites and a friend's blog and forum site. That server is shared with a number of other people. In total, over 100 commerce sites are hosted on it. Mel's subscription to Ed's BuildaSkill site includes that she receives occasional emails from the forum news sections updating her about important changes or cheap listing days on eBay UK, eBid and similar. Those are the emails reported to SpamCop.

Because they were reported to SpamCop, the data centre reported that the server was blacklisted and no-one could send emails for 24 hours. My hosting space account has been suspended and my three commerce sites and Ed's site locked out (perhaps even purged from the drives) - the datacentre reported all this in an email and then refused to communicate further with me.

The server and site access was taken down at 10:30pm BST last night (4:30am here) within 15 minutes of the spam account alert being issued from SpamCop. I was actually online editing one of the SQL databases at the time the take down occurred - that's how I was able to react so quickly and on so many sites where I know you lurk.

That's a year's worth of sitebuilding and marketing completely down the tubes, not to mention I had only just renewed the domain registrations and hosting account - a lot of money that I will now have to pay to another hosting company to start again from scratch. Money that I cannot afford due to many factors in the online sales world this year.

To you Mel, it may have been a simple mistake, but it has had calamitous effects on my business and on my planned exit from eBay by Christmas, not to mention that I will now not have the time for the planned re-entry to eBid this year. I am out a lot of money and a year's worth of working 20-hour days six days a week. Christmas this year is going to be very Dickensian out here.

"Think before you Click" - it should be a compulsory flashing warning with alarm bells on every pc using SpamCop - it's not a virus assassin, it's a business assassin.

Oh, and just to make things worse - Tomorrow was to have been the 1st anniversary of Ed's BuildaSkill site and a big online party had been planned. That obviously cannot happen now.

(Finally, what I said I would have you removed from was the membership of Ed's site, so that you received no more emails about the news in the online auction world - as those were the emails you had reported to SpamCop, you obviously didn't want to receive them).

Gaz

Still not a happy bunny

[funky_fudge_factory]

MY simple mistake??

I'm not an idiot, of course I realise the seriousness of it, you made it quite clear in all of your emails. What YOU fail to realise, is that it was NOT my mistake.

I have been receiving all of the emails for a long while without a problem. So just for clarities sake, I will say it again, I DID NOT PLACE YOUR EMAILS IN THE SPAM FOLDER, SPAMCOP DID. For whatever reason, spamcop have changed the status of your emails from safe to "spam" and they were then forwarded to a separate folder, along with the 5000 or so other spam emails. I did NOT log into my account and change the status, this was something that SPAMCOP did. I can't explain it any simpler than that save for repeating myself, again.

Suffice it to say, I don't appreciate waking up to abusive, accusational emails, facebook messages and my very own thread on a public forum about something you could quite easily have just emailed me about. If someone on here HAD a phone number for me, what were you proposing to do with it at 2am in the morning ?? It was NOT a personal attack against you or the website, you should know me better than that ! I can fully understand the need to get it resolved as quickly as possible, but I'm not sure what you expected me to do at midnight last night.

I have emailed spamcop this morning, you have no doubt done the same. They will probably contact you to ask about the "opt in" procedure on your website and the matter can then be resolved.

[gazlannathai]

Mel

Regarding your pressing question - what was I going to do with your telephone number? - I had someone in the UK intimate with the SpamCop system who was going to call you mid-morning if you had not responded to the emails. All the indicators from online activity were that you might have been away on holiday - e.g. your last activity on facebook was 18 August. Your presence here on eBid was scarse, etc.

If it had turned out that you were away on holiday, then that phone call could have ascertained if anyone at your home was not, and if they had triggered the SpamCop report, then they could have been appraised of what they had caused, and how to rectify it.

Regarding the tone of the direct emails, I'm sorry, I was extremely angry and upset, and you know me of old that when something so drastic and revenue threatening as that happens, I take off like the Space Shuttle. That's my character / nature. However, I usually calm down and forgive just as quickly once the crisis is resolved.

Interestingly, when I interrogated the SpamCop and associated systems last night within an hour of the sites being taken down, none of those systems had any adverse info recorded against the server IP address or the domain names. They still did not have this afternoon, or this evening. Therefore the suspension is a direct result of the single SpamCop report - my hosting company's techies and management have had their ears well and truly roasted based on this information.
I'm waiting to see if they'll reinstate the hosting account, but am also putting in place readiness to move the domains completely to a different hosting company.


There are some possible lessons for everyone (not just Mel and myself) from this -

1.
SpamCop is NOT to be trusted - if they are de-whitelisting, and moving to greylist or blacklist, user-approved correspondents without their subscribers' authorisation, then they have a major flaw in their front end systems (user application side). Imagine if they started blocking your parents' or kids' emails while they were off on a round-the-world holiday or similar.

2.
SpamCop appear to be failing to recognise that one person's spam is another person's approved / authorised / essential / wanted correspondence, and allow their users the freedom of choice - that is far too Orwellian a system in my opinion. It is exactly the type of "one size fits all" approach that eBay have applied to feedback, and other policies, this year causing buyers and sellers alike to leave in droves and be replaced by genuine scam artists and thieves. (Same applies to many of PayPal's policies introduced or ammended this year).

It is possible (but unknown) that SpamCop may have introduced a "periodic re-authorisation" or something similar whereby issuers of incoming emails have to "re-verify" from time-to-time that they are a real person and not a spam-bot, or something along those lines - again, far too Big Brother and "police state" for my liking, if that's what happened, but then, I refuse to visit the USA because I object to being fingerprinted at airports.

Imagine the chaos this could cause amongst corporates - some overworked network techie at British Airports Authority, or Shell, forgets to "re-authorise" the domain address with SpamBot and BANG that company gets blacklisted. Stranger things have happened - a couple of years ago, Hotmail & Google blacklisted eBay Messaging.

3.
Anyone with their own website that issues news or bulletins or update emails would be best recommended to purge their user list of all users whose email footers show them to be users of SpamCop - you never know when the same thing will happen to you as has happened to Ed and myself as discussed in this thread.

Besides, why pay good money each year for this service when a properly configured email client and server will do the same job at no extra cost. That's part of why we all pay hosting fees to the web hosting companies. Good hosting services will pre-filter incoming emails for spam and move it to a dedicated spam inbox within the email side of your account - no need to pay a 3rd party to do it.


It is information, experiences, and stories, like the one above that are the primary reason for the BuildaSkill site existing (so at least there's a new (non-eBay) topic for Ed and I to write about when the site gets back up) Anything that switches the lead story away from eBay has to be good - right?

Gaz