On Tue, Dec 07, 2010 at 04:39:54PM -0000, Gavin Pearce wrote:
How many of you (honestly) actively manage and respond to abuse@ contact details listed in WHOIS? Or have had any luck with abuse@ contacts in the past? Who's good and who isn't?
Inbound: wherever I am, I try to make it a point of emphasis that incoming mail to abuse very likely represent someone trying to help us by doing the job that we failed to do, and as such, it deserves very high priority, and -- if correct -- our gratitude.
Outbound: mixed. I've had excellent response from academic institutions (most recently Indiana University) and from some commercial operations (e.g., mail.com). I've had responses somewhere between "non-existent", "miserable", and "random" from major freemail providers.
Having watched this issue for years, I'll say that there's a large body of good abuse desks you'll never need to talk to, because the very qualities that cause a network to host a responsive abuse desk are in many cases the same things that drive engineering and other processes that minimize the chances for abuse in the first place. For the best networks, the abuse desk exists entirely as a fire alarm, never meant to receive any volume of meaningful complaints, because there should be no abusive traffic originating. This includes many corporate networks. Middle ground are many schools, where policy is to run a clean network, but practical realities of students and faculty result in some problems. They truly appreciate abuse reports, because so few people bother to send them in this era, and doing so helps make the Internet a nicer place to be. On the other hand, other schools have clearly given the issue no thought, or don't wish to deal with the problems... Commercial service providers are more of a mixed bag. Many are very clueful and want to run a clean network. Others look at the abuse desk as a money-losing black hole that serves mainly to cause customer churn. Cheap webhosts and the like are typically under pressure to keep costs low. You may end up with an abuse desk that overreacts, or that doesn't care until the volume of complaints becomes deafening. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.