If you’re complaining about having to maintain an abuse desk or putting a dummy address into your whois records, sturgeons law says most of the time you’re the sort of provider who doesn’t want to staff an abuse desk.

At my previous job for an ISP, I was the abuse desk among my other responsibilities. 

Fully 50% of "abuse" reports were "STOP PINGING ME".  Another 20% were one gentleman who forwarded every spam message he ever received, adamantly refusing to use the 'Report Spam' button in our webmail application.  

Even today, in my current role,I have had countless 'abuse' issues escalated to my level that turned out to be things that have nothing to do with our network at all. 

When reporters don't understand the difference between 'abuse' and 'annoyance', abuse mailboxes become nothing more than a relic of the past.

On Fri, Aug 6, 2021 at 11:52 AM Suresh Ramasubramanian <ops.lists@gmail.com> wrote:
If the way x is managing their network or (not) managing their customers means my network and my customers are affected .. 

route leaks? packet kiddies? phish sites? spammers? whatever.  If what you’re doing or not doing affects someone else, expect complaints, possibly to your  upstreams if you aren’t receptive to these.  

Not everybody mailing your abuse address is reporting random alerts their $50 home router’s firewall throws up, or is trying to spam you.  

OK. All that stuff happens but is easy enough to filter out, and well, spammers who add an abuse address to their lists deserve all the blocking they get.

If you’re complaining about having to maintain an abuse desk or putting a dummy address into your whois records, sturgeons law says most of the time you’re the sort of provider who doesn’t want to staff an abuse desk.

--srs

From: NANOG <nanog-bounces+ops.lists=gmail.com@nanog.org> on behalf of Mike Hammett <nanog@ics-il.net>
Sent: Friday, August 6, 2021 7:51:04 PM
To: Matt Corallo <nanog@as397444.net>
Cc: NANOG <nanog@nanog.org>
Subject: Re: Abuse Contact Handling
 
"we don’t get to tell someone they’re managing their network wrong"

Sure we do. They don't have to listen, but we get to tell them. RFCs are full of things that one shall not do, must do, etc. We shame network operators all of the time for things they do that affect the global community.



-----
Mike Hammett
Intelligent Computing Solutions
http://www.ics-il.com

Midwest-IX
http://www.midwest-ix.com


From: "Matt Corallo" <nanog@as397444.net>
To: "Mike Hammett" <nanog@ics-il.net>
Cc: "NANOG" <nanog@nanog.org>
Sent: Friday, August 6, 2021 8:50:00 AM
Subject: Re: Abuse Contact Handling

Costs real money to figure out, for each customer scanning parts of the internet, if they’re doing it legitimately or maliciously. Costs real money to look into whether someone is spamming or just sending bulk email that customers signed up for. And what do you do if it is legitimate? Lots of abuse reports don’t follow X-ARF, so now you have to have a human process than and chose which ones to ignore. Or you just tell everyone to fill out a common web form and then the data is all nice and structured and you can process it sanely.

Like Randy said, we don’t get to tell someone they’re managing their network wrong. If you don’t want to talk to AWS, don’t talk to AWS. If you want them to manage their network differently, reach out, understand their business concerns, help alleviate them. Maybe propose a second Abuse Contact type that only accepts X-ARF that they can use? There’s lots of things that could be done that are productive here.

Matt


On Aug 6, 2021, at 08:08, Mike Hammett <nanog@ics-il.net> wrote:


I suppose if they did a better job of policing their own network, they wouldn't have as much hitting their e-mail boxes.



-----
Mike Hammett
Intelligent Computing Solutions
http://www.ics-il.com

Midwest-IX
http://www.midwest-ix.com


From: "Matt Corallo" <nanog@as397444.net>
To: "Mike Hammett" <nanog@ics-il.net>, "NANOG" <nanog@nanog.org>
Sent: Thursday, August 5, 2021 3:44:43 PM
Subject: Re: Abuse Contact Handling

There's a few old threads on this from last year or so, but while unmonitored abuse contacts are terrible, similarly,
people have installed automated abuse contact spammer systems which is equally terrible. Thus, lots of the large hosting
providers have deemed the cost of actually putting a human on an abuse contact is much too high.

I'm not sure what the answer is here, but I totally get why large providers just say "we can better protect a web form
with a captcha than an email box, go use that if there's real abuse".

Matt

On 8/5/21 09:14, Mike Hammett wrote:
> What does the greater operator community think of RIR abuse contacts that are unmonitored autoresponders?
>
>
>
> -----
> Mike Hammett
> Intelligent Computing Solutions
> http://www.ics-il.com
>
> Midwest-IX
> http://www.midwest-ix.com