On Thu, Aug 13, 2020 at 11:34 AM Hans-Martin Mosner via mailop <mailop@mailop.org> wrote: > > Mails to abuse@ should be handled quickly without being CC'd to a VP. It's > the abuse desks job to stop abuse ASAP. If they are understaffed or don't > have authority to stop spamming senders then there's an organizational > problem that can not be solved by handling abuse reports from the VP's seat.
I'm not here to defend any given provider, but I will say, I wish you could see the amount of absolute garbage that an abuse desk address gets. They get tons of GWF Goober With Firewall reports -- the "stop hacking my port 80" kind of thing. They get weirdo tinfoil hat reports from actually, really crazy people who CC half the earth and want an ESP to do something about a bad Amazon order they placed two years ago or they need you to send the troops into India ASAP. They get tons of actual spam directed at abuse@ domain, because some A-holes mad about the provider thought it would be funny to submit that address to signup forms as a form of payback. And the abuse desk typically cannot run a spam filter because the chances of it eating legit spam reports is high. They get tons of misdirected customer service emails-- online store X may be a client and the user opted-in but is mad about their last order so they think complaining to the ESP is going to get them a refund on their order. Then you get complaints from people who are lawyers or think they are lawyers and they demand payment because some client pissed them off, or they cite some non-existent law or legal theory and get mad if you don't follow their explicit instructions. Then you get lots of what might be legit complaints but there are no headers or other markers to identify a particular client, send or IP. Then you get phishing warnings from security services who get confused everything they see a redirect in a URL, and even if it legitimately starts on bank.com and ends on bank.com, some of them still get confused and send helpful third party takedown recommendations. Then you get some legitimate complaints but they've mangled the forwarding enough that the automation can't parse it. Is it QP, Base64, 7-bit, UTF-8, headers pasted in body, MIME attachment in some format other than ARF, etc. etc. etc. Most of that automation is either home grown or a ticketing system not meant for abuse work so each one of them probably fails to properly read at least one of those types of messages. And thus, even with automation, it can be hard to quickly figure out which complaints matter most, and those perfect complaints with full headers pasted into a new email report to abuse don't always get handled as quickly as you might like. Does ESP X have a systemic problem? That I can't speak to. But man, I can only imagine the volume of useless emails to abuse they are having to wade through. Cheers, Al Iverson -- Al Iverson // Wombatmail // Chicago Song a day! https://www.wombatmail.com Deliverability! https://spamresource.com And DNS Tools too! https://xnnd.com _______________________________________________ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://chilli.nosignal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mailop
