On Sun, 13 Apr 2008, Geo. wrote:
of abuse might be useful for large providers, but since we can't even get many domains even to set up the already-specified abuse@ address, much less read the mail we send to it,
When someone like AOL offloads their user complaints of spams to all the abuse@ addresses instead of verifying that they actually are spams before sending off complaints, is it any surprise that everyone else is refusing to do their jobs for them?
The reason abuse@ addresses are useless is because what is being sent to them is useless.
As one that works for a company that makes full use of complaints sent to it, abuse@ addresses are not useless, far from it. Please don't get the idea that because some think they're useless, it therefore is universal. We also get 100s of AOL feedbacks a day, which are filtered separately. Also not useless. And we've also reported incidents to other companies' abuse functions, and had them be resolved same-day because of it. Also, far from useless. How about if you're not actively in an abuse function, you hold off on declaring the function useless, cause the meme could catch on that it is, even if it's not, and I've yet to see an automated filtering/blocking system fully replace or completely obsolete a good trained network operator who understands what is and is not abuse on the network. -Dave D