Countless emails wrongly blocked as spam after Cisco's SpamCop failed to renew domain name at the weekend

Cisco's anti-spam service SpamCop failed to renew spamcop.net over weekend, causing it to lapse, which resulted in countless messages being falsely labeled and rejected as spam around the world. From what we can tell, this is what happened. When the domain name expired, *.spamcop.net resolved to a domain parking service's IP …

[James12345]

Exhbitionism

"If a user was banned for exhbitionism, someone who knows their email address or social media accounts could threaten to expose them."

I suspect that the banned user will be the one doing the exposing.

[Doctor Syntax]

Nobody took the opportunity to grab the spamcop domain?

[foxyshadis]

That wouldn't be possible; the owner has an automatic 30 days' grace period to renew before it's allowed to go back on the market. Most registrars will put up a parking page during that period. It's when it stops resolving entirely that it's on the market.

[Dave Pickles]

SpamCop

Yes I had a very quiet Sunday thanks to all incoming mail being flagged as spam. Fortunately nothing important got bounced.

From https://www.spamcop.net/fom-serve/cache/351.html SpamCop are supposed to return 127.0.0.2 if an address is marked as spamogenic, or NXDOMAIN otherwise, I believe Spamhaus do the same. Instead the address of the domain parking page was returned. Maybe postfix ought not to reject mail if the check returns an unexpected IP address.

[sitta_europea]

Re: SpamCop

"Maybe postfix ought not to reject mail if the check returns an unexpected IP address."

Well here, Sendmail running my own milter didn't, so I suspect with a decent interface Postfix would have done the same.

[yetanotheraoc]

Think of the premiums!

"The Association of British Insurers has defended the practice, saying that its customers must take "reasonable precautions" against attack and that without the payouts its members provide, some companies would face financial ruin."

How very philanthropic of the insurers. Hit by ransomware once, and bailed out by their insurance company, there is no way a company would cancel that coverage, no matter how eye-watering the price rise...

[fidodogbreath]

The Spamcop blurb will likely become a future "Who, me?" submission.