Fwd: [anti-abuse-wg] How to Ask For A Website to Be taken Down, was How Not To Ask For A Website to Be taken Down

On 24/Dec/10 22:44, Mark Foster wrote:
> 2010/12/24 Tobias Knecht <tk at abusix.com <mailto:tk at abusix.com>>
>>  We are already working on a format, that is used by more and more
>>  people. It is meant as an extension to the well known RFC 5965 ARF.
>>  Called X-ARF. http://xarf.org
> 
> Anything that makes reporting abuse harder for the victim, is
> counter-productive, IMHO.

Automation is supposed to make reporting easier for the victim, not
harder.  Many webmail sites already have a "Report as Spam" button.
It should be added to regular (POP3/IMAP) mail clients too.

> This to me is all an attempt to make abuse-complaint-receivers better
> equipped to use automation to deal with complaints.

Yes, for the good and the bad of it.  Among the goodies, it should be
feasible to to route spam reports so that a network provider gets a
copy and forwards it to the relevant mailbox provider, thereby
allowing the former to somehow control the latter.

> Noone who reports abuse likes talking to automation.

I think you mean noone who /manually/ reports abuse, as in the OP BofA
case.  If an abuse@ mailbox is equipped with software that recognizes
automatic formats, human recipients might still be able to read the
rest in the usual way.

Whether a hand-written complaint should be sent to an abuse@ address
depends on how report formats will take on.  This consideration may
explain why some organizations try and push a specific format.  The
abuse@ address is just mentioned by RFC 2142, but issuing a spam
report does not necessarily require even SMTP, although it seems to be
the most natural way of reporting email abuse.

BTW, there is a third format, developed in the framework of RFC 6045.