Lazy network operators

Mon Apr 12 18:50:17 UTC 2004

on Mon, Apr 12, 2004 at 01:01:28PM -0400, Robert Blayzor wrote:
> 
> Steven Champeon wrote:
> 
> >>[...] Having our techs/engineers go through the abuse@ box every day
> >>to play hide and seek is a bit of an agonizing task that nobody really
> >>wants, especially at the volume it is today.
> >
> >
> >Isn't it their job?
> 
> Yes and no.  They're responsible for addressing the real problems, and 
> those issues are sometimes missed or lost to the shear volume of bogus 
> messages that surround them. 

Sure, I understand, I'm in the same boat here, though on a smaller
scale, but I don't see how disabling RFC-mandated role accounts will do
anything but further erode confidence in ISPs' willingness to respond to
complaints.

To addess the same issue, I've tried various things over the past few
months, such as rejecting all abuse/postmaster mail if the primary
Content-Type is text/html, with a message saying that the sender should
use plain text mail; rejecting postmaster to hosted domains asking the
sender to use the postmaster address in the primary domain instead, etc.
And I've only had *one* legitimate abuse report in seven years of
hosting, and only a dozen or so legit postmaster complaints (it's the
address I point people to in the event that their mail was improperly
blocked).

On the bright side, actually examining the bogus stuff hones skills in
spam recognition, which should in theory at least make it easier on those
who are doing the scanning. 

> It's also managements job to try to streamline things so that
> engineers are not wasting valuable amounts of time on things like
> mailboxes full of spam. If I can optimize that task and save a few man
> hours a week, I will.

Oh, and that's your right, certainly. But please don't switch to web
based systems. I get spam via SMTP, I should be able to report it via
SMTP. Asking me to switch to a Web browser is insane and will only serve
to reduce the number of legitimate abuse reports, feeding the erroneous
supposition that if spam goes unreported it isn't a problem.

As of today, fully 60% of my incoming mail is spam; 30% are bounces from
accept-then-bounce servers; and we're quickly approaching 99% spam for
several of the domains we host mail for. The last thing we need is for
ISPs to deal with their inbound problem by ignoring abuse reports or
making it more difficult for victims to report spam or viruses
originating from their networks.

Steve

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