Re: [Patents] Spamcop tax on NGOs

[Jonas Maebe <jonas.maebe@elis.ugent.be>]

On 15 jun 2004, at 09:31, Justin Mason wrote:

> bad news.  However, did it actually have any effect?  Spamcop have a
> "threshold" system, whereby multiple reports are required before 
> something
> is considered spam, if I recall correctly.  So it should not have 
> caused
> any trouble, unless there were others.

Not only that, but "spamvertized sites" never result in any kind of 
spamcop blacklisting. They only blacklist sources of reported emails 
(in this case that would have been fsfeurope's server, but it's not 
listed).

It's of course different when we send out the mailings ourselves.

And I disagree that spamcop is the evil entity here. Their blacklist is 
simply an opinion they publish, and everyone can decide for himself 
whether to follow it or not (just like with any other blacklist). I 
understand it's very annoying if you send out (legitimate or not) mass 
mailings, but we don't live in an ideal world and everyone has his own 
way to protect against spammers (with more or less collateral damage 
depending on your acceptable threshold).

Spamcop's blacklist is known to give a lot of false positives and they 
themselves discourage everyone to block simply based on it (it's still 
useful for scoring purposes in e.g. spamassassin). Of course, there are 
several people who do that anyway.


Jonas