Email suspended cause - does this mean we got caught in the receivers spam filter?

[Anonymous]

Hi,  

we just did a campaign and a large number of our emails were not delivered and the Email suspended cause is:

Exceeded MaxAttempts - 554 5.7.1 Service unavailable; Client host [94.236.119.12] blocked using bl.spamcop.net; Blocked - see http://www.spamcop.net/bl.shtml?94.236.119.12

Does this mean that our email was caught in the spam filter of all receivers with this email suspended cause. If so, what we do about it?

Thanks

[Anonymous]

Yes, that's exactly what happened.  And spamcop is a real problem, as it seems to run mostly on volume with low thresholds, so if you have a newsletter that goes to more than just a very few  people in an organization, it sees a dozen emails from same source to various individuals at the same timeframe from a less-than-directly-mapped-by-domain mail host, and it pushes a temporary suspension on suspected spam source.  As near as I can tell, the only real workarounds are seriously throttling your send volume so that only a very few emails would hit a single recipient domain within an hour, or getting yourself on the organization's whitelist.

[Anonymous]

Hey,

You may go through the below URL for your answer:

What the heck happened!? When your deliverability takes a hit

[SanfordWhiteman]

Carley Donovan​ FYI: I just saw you marked one of the above comments as helpful, but it's actually wrong. The way it characterizes SpamCop is incorrect. In fact SpamCop is not an automatic bulk email detection service -- "it sees a dozen emails from the same source" isn't the way it works. SC relies on manual submission of claimed spam by end users, and supplementarily on automated submission from spamtrap addresses. It's possible that some mailservers are feeding the blacklist based on simple bulk email (whether spam or not), but they are using it incorrectly if so.

An anti-spam service that actually functions as described is DCC. This is a clearinghouse of bulk email, i.e. mail that is known to have been sent in large quantities. This doesn't mean it's spam, of course, but it's used as part of the equation. It's basically the opposite of how SpamCop is intended to wok.

[Anonymous]

Ah, thank you for letting me know and clarifying. I've been trying to get more detail on how spam cop determines what is spam vs what is not. I know the general characteristics it looks for, but was wondering how it was weighted. I suppose that information is likely heavily guarded, but your information definitely helps. If you have any links to information about this, please let me know.

[SanfordWhiteman]

SpamCop doesn't determine spamminess of the email per se. SC's blacklisting is based on a critical mass of reports from different recipients that the email is spam.  For example, you can get the SpamCop plugin for Outlook that lets you participate in the "crowdsourced" decision to blacklist a sender. There are also recipients with well-vetted spamtrap addresses, which are defined as addresses whose only inbound mail must be spam, so it can be automatically reported.