[Scspamcop] Re: setting up a spamtrap

[Sofa King Tyred of Lar Ting]

Chris Wright wrote:
> Sofa King Tyred of Lar Ting wrote:
>> Andrzej Filip wrote:
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>>> Sofa King Tyred of Lar Ting wrote:
>>>> Andrzej Filip wrote:
>>>>> [...]
>>>>> I have seen a few lists sending "requests to confirm subscription" in a
>>>>> single "non English" language.
>>>> Sorry, but I don't understand the importance of this.
>>> Would you *recognize* "subscription verification request" sent to you
>>> *only* in Chinese/Polish/...? :-)
>>> Some *LAME* list maintainers are fully capable to do it.
>> The language of the message or recognizing the content is moot. It's
>> backscatter aka spam sent to a spamtrap, as I already described.
> 
> I think the important comment about this was snipped, but I believe
> someone said that some spammers use 'lists' to poison spamtraps.
> 
> So you would see a non-english request come into your spamtrap, and
> report it as spam, which is what the spammer wants.
> That then discredits your spam trap.
> 
> *i think*

I'm still missing the importance. I don't see many spammers wasting 
their time with this tactic. Anyway, how does a non-English request 
(that is backscatter, 99.9% of the time sent by a zombie PC) sent to a 
spamtrap discredit the spamtrap?

Spamcop recognizes these as "misdirected bounce" and it doesn't care 
what the language is, AFAIK. The reports would go to the ISP of the list 
mailer, for sending a "misdirected bounce".

The initial comment was that I said spamtraps mostly facilitated 
reporting of spam, since all email sent to them is definitely spam. The 
response to that was that spammers could fool mailing lists into 
replying to spamtraps. My response was "that is still spam" since it's 
misdirected auto-replies.

Now, if the spammers had ways of getting spamtrap address *subscribed* 
to mailing lists, I could "buy" the discredit problem. AFAIK, that's not 
possible with a serious list.

Happy 2008, by the way :-)