On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 6:27 PM, Nonaht Leyte <alif.terranson@gmail.com>wrote: Any abuse department which outright rejects (or claims they are unable to
process) an obfuscated ("munged") complaint is not to be trusted - period.
This is very credible from someone admitting to scrubbing reports, of information required by some abuse teams to appropriately process complaints, *NOT*. You say scrub.... Many would say: munging evidence, so that it is no longer admissible, or usable as supporting documentation to suspend or terminate a subscriber's service. There are abuse departments that would ignore such reports, or reply, requesting information before proceeding, and they have that right; especially, if the scrubbed reports don't offer sufficient evidence, for their particular investigation workflow to function.
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),
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,
This is an assumption, that is only true in some cases.
conversely, the most expertly organized) spammer will leave a complaint trail. The complaints grow in importance as they grow in number: ten
Often the spammer will not leave a complaint trail; they may very well have sent 1000 messages, that are logged with various different From: addresses. However, non-spammers will also often leave a "complaint trail"; to give an example: very often, non-spammers will even forward their own mail to another mailbox provider, e.g. Yahoo/AOL, and report duly forwarded spam that arrives in their forwarding destination inbox, as spam originating from the forwarding provider. Without the recipient address; the provider doing the mail forwarding has no idea if it is the forwarded mail, or ordinarily sent mail that is being filed as spam. -- -JH