Abuse.cc ???

Thu Apr 3 16:10:05 UTC 2003

> On Thu, Apr 03, 2003 at 10:05:55AM -0500, McBurnett, Jim wrote:
> >
> >    I just made a number of abuse complaints to a provider and then after
> >    contacting the abuse #.
> >    I got told that they don't use abuse@ anymore. that abuse.cc is the
> >    new email address.
> >    Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't this against RFC current practice?
>
> Providers don't seem to care about RFC or abuse@ anymore...

I hate to play devil's advocate here, but I've been on the receiving end
of the abuse@ complaints that became unmanagable. The bulk of them
consisting of:

"Your user at x.x.x.x attacked me!" (And this is sometimes the
nameserver:53 or mailserver:113)

This is not a log file, or a source/destination port. The most commonly
left out item was Time/Time zone. The company I worked for at the time did
not harbor spammers. These were open relays, public proxies, & all
around poorly configured/maintained machines. The size of our customer
base, however, prevented a personal reply to all of them that said: "You
left out X, please try again."

With a legitimate desire to address valid complaints against customers, we
started bouncing back an acknowledgment msg that said simply if you don't
provide us all of the following, we won't reply and request it, your
submission will be ignored. We also setup an abuse-esc@ that would
circumvent the ack msg.

Problem is/was people don't read the bounce back. I know this isn't the
case with all of the abuse@ addresses, but we talked about creating a web
form for submission so we could smack the submitter on the head when they
left out relevant information.

Another aspect of the social spam problem trying to be resolved through
technical means.

Gerald