It can be useful to explain the abuse desk as being just another form of marketing, another form of reputation management that happens to be specific to Internet companies.
Is it? I mean, I may know that (a hypothetical) example.com is a pink-contract-signing batch of incompetents who spew spam like a bulemic firehose. You may know that. 10,000 other mail administrators may know that. But once they have signed up 2.3 million users with example.com they are too big (for most email administrators) to block, so at that point the cost of disbanding their abuse desk and pointing complaints to /dev/null is nil.
Handling the abuse desk well (or poorly) builds (or damages) the brand.
...among people who are educated among such things. Unfortunately, people with clue are orders of magnitude short of a majority, and the rest of the world (ie: potential customers) wouldn't know an abuse desk from a self-abuse desk. -- Dave Pooser, ACSA Manager of Information Services Alford Media http://www.alfordmedia.com