Like virtually everyone on the planet who has an email account, I am inundated with and hotly annoyed by the volume of spam that I see in my inbox. While 90% of it gets filtered out by the ISP’s servers, several messages still get through. Either spammers are coming up with more clever ways to circumvent the Bayesian filters and the filters aren’t keeping pace, or there is an ever-increasing proliferation of these scumbags, or both, I’ve been using Mailwasher Pro for awhile, and while it’s gratifying to some degree to be able to delete and bounce spam mail, it’s not enough to keep these asswipes at bay (and I am doubtful as to how many bounces actually get back to the spammer). I decided to turn up the heat a notch or two by signing on with Spamcop and reporting spammers. Since Mailwasher works in conjunction with Spamcop, the process of reporting spam is quite easy. It all seems like a good thing, but when I ran a Google search on Spamcop several sites indicated that using it can cause problems, such as blacklisting legitimate emails. I’ve been using it for about a week, and while it doesn’t seem to curb the volume of spam that gets through, I feel it’s the most I can do short of physically locating each and every spammer and strangling him.
I’d like to know what other people’s experiences have been with using Spamcop. I don’t recall any recent threads on it, so I hope I’m not repeating something that was discussed here already. Has anyone ever actually seen a reduction in spam from using it? Is there a way to know when your report has successfully shut down a spammer? How effective is Spamcop with shutting down spammers? I was hopig to see some statistics on their site but I didn’t see anything like this. Also, I have read in some of the sites I Googled on Spamcop that spammers sometimes seek revenge and try to go after the people who shut them down (such evil pricks they are). Has anyone ever experienced such personal attacks or threats from Spamcopped spammers, either via email or IRL?