SpamCop FAQ

Trash

We hear this occasionally. Here is how to test your setup if you're not receiving any email.

Send a test email

First, send an email directly to your spamcop.net email address. Then, login to webmail or use your regular email program to see if it shows up. If it does, that shows that we're receiving email and your account is currently capable of receiving email.

SpamCop POPs mail from your ISP

If we POP your mail for you, login to webmail and go to your POP settings. Are your POP accounts listed as having zero errors? If not, there should be a clue here as to why we are unable to POP your mail any more.

Your ISP forwards mail to Spamcop

If you forward your email from another address to SpamCop, ask the internet provider that forwards your email what is going on. Most of the time, we find that there is an error or problem at the forwarding provider. Any decent mail provider will have detailed logs of the deliveries that they attempt and what happened. Without these logs, there is very little that we can do. If your forwarding provider doesn't even try to deliver the email, we obviously cannot receive it.

Some ISP's might be hard to deal with or refuse to provide logs. Please remember that we are the last in a chain of computers which handles your email. If a computer earlier breaks the chain, we'll never receive your email. Email logs are like package tracking. If they won't help, you ought to consider using a different ISP to handle your email.

SpamCop forwards mail to destination address

Several times we have had questions about missing mail where our system is configured to forward email to another computer system. In all of these cases, we are able to provide logs showing the exact time of the delivery and the return status code that the distant ISP gave us. If we hand your mail to your ISP and they lose it, again there's nothing we can do. If your ISP is unreachable, your email will be stored here and again, we'll have logs of all of this and will be glad to provide them to you so you can work with your ISP to correct the situation.

Multiple email programs (Mail User Agents [MUA]) running

We have had reports in the past of missing mail where the user has later discovered that they left an email program running at the office or at home. That other program was downloading and removing all of the email and storing it locally on that computer. When the user checked mail at one location, they didn't see any because it had all been downloaded already to the other location. So, make sure you don't leave your email program running if you need to read your email somewhere else.

Your server is blocklisted

Occasionally, a user ends up with their own mailserver on the SpamCop blocklist. This causes all of their email to be held. Check your Held Mail to see if all of your email is there for some reason.

If you still are not receiving mail

Finally, our system is engineered to be extremely robust. No mail is ever deleted by our system until is has been verified to be delivered to the next location. Every time this issue comes up, it turns out that the problem is somewhere else, usually another ISP that is having temporary problems and fails to forward email for a while. We will be glad to work with you, but we need the following information:

• The exact date, time, and timezone you sent a test message directly to your spamcop.net account.
• The exact date, time, and timezone you sent a test message to another account which forwards to your spamcop.net account (if applicable).
• Logs from your forwarding ISP showing that they either delivered a message which never showed up or that they received an error when attempting to deliver a message (if applicable).
• Your spamcop.net username and the email address that you use which forwards to your spamcop.net account (if applicable).