If you send him a complaint scrubbed in the manner you describe, he won't have enough information to act. You'd basically be wasting both his time and yours.
As many here know, I spent 4 years on the receiving end of the abuse@savvisbox: when I was hired it was for multiple roles, but the abuse@was a primary. Savvis had a significant spam problem when I arrived, and until just a few months before I left, had literally none. First of all, *every* abuse email should be seriously investigated, regardless of header obfuscation. Secondly, header obfuscation is NOT a waste of time for abuse@ - in fact, it is only marginally less useful than a "fully loaded" complaint. The reason is that even the smallest (or, conversely, the most expertly organized) spammer will leave a complaint trail. The complaints grow in importance as they grow in number: ten complaints in the morning abuse email tells me that there is a serious problem with the sender, even if every single header and other identifying information is removed from the complaints. Ten complaints may not indicate malice (although it usually does), but it does tell abuse@ to start their resolution clock. Any abuse department which outright rejects (or claims they are unable to process) an obfuscated ("munged") complaint is not to be trusted - period. The abuse department that wont respond to munging is deliberately closing their eyes to abuse on their network. Any abuse@ that fails to immediately act on reports of third-party beneficiaries (for example, drop boxes or ordering websites) on their network is doing the same thing. As a complainant, rather than the abuse@ recipient, I will always scrub my reports *thoroughly*, by removing the significant digits of time stamps, any unique identifiers I can find (from message-ID to unsubscribe links), and anything else I think can possibly be used to listwash. The only exception to this is if I am reporting to someone I know and explicitly trust (and there are damn few of those left). As the abuse@ guy, I would strongly encourage scrubbed reports, even reports which prove nothing other than an email went out that was unwanted (as opposed to unsolicited - it's not uncommon for people to make "spam complaints" rather than unsubscribe from mailings they legitimately subscribed to). There are a multitude of internal [& proprietary] tools at most ISPs that can lead to the appropriate determination as to what is or isn't spamming, but for the tools to be used, there needs to be a starting complaint(s). //Alif On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 4:40 PM, William Herrin <bill@herrin.us> wrote:
On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 5:16 PM, Anne P. Mitchell, Esq. <amitchell@isipp.com> wrote:
Because this is an issue inherent primarily with bulk mail, we remove all identifying information *except* the unsub link, which *should* have a unique identifying token embedded within, from which the sender *should* be able to determine the complainant's email address.
Hi Anne,
Judging from Landon's web page a vanishingly small percentage of his customers are in the opt-in mailing list business. He's in the generic hosting business, so aside from the abusers his customers will tend to be heavy on single-recipient administrative emails rather than mailing lists.
If you send him a complaint scrubbed in the manner you describe, he won't have enough information to act. You'd basically be wasting both his time and yours.
Failure to do so can (and usually does) result in termination of their accreditation
Accreditation of what?
Regards, Bill Herrin
-- William D. Herrin ................ herrin@dirtside.com bill@herrin.us 3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/> Falls Church, VA 22042-3004