From: Gavin Pearce <Gavin.Pearce@3seven9.com>
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?
We monitor our abuse queues, but when the email is just a stock standard incident (eg: spam or phishing) we don't actually reply to the emails unless more information is required. As mentioned previously, a lot of the traffic in abuse queues is automated and you might have anywhere up to 100 emails for a single incident. In these cases, we merge the messages into one ticket, handle the case and close it off. The nature of our business (hosting) means that we do get a decent amount of abuse traffic - ranging from compromised out of date CMSs used to send spam or host phishing sites right through to fraudulent accounts again used to send spam. Rather than hire additional staff to respond to the each abuse email individually we prefer to invest in systems to stop the abuse in the first place. For example, all outbound email from our shared hosting network is checked for spam/viruses and any unusual traffic (such as a spike from a customer who typically only sends a few messages a day) is flagged. -Shaun