[Scspamcop] Re: SpamCop regard responses to complainants as abuse

[Anthony Edwards]

On Wed, 2 May 2007 14:11:21 -0700, Mike Easter <MikeE at ster.invalid> wrote:

> I am not interested in reading autoacks from providers.  I only notify
> sources and I only care if the report contributes to the SCbl.  I am not
> interested in anything except a 'comprehensive' behavior of the
> provider.  I think it is worthwhile to notify the provider of the
> trojanized userIP, but what a provider is going to do about it is going
> to depend upon the policies of th provider more than they will depend
> upon the occurrence of 1 SC report of an assortment of a thousand
> unopened SC reports.

Abuse reports are valuable to us, and we take the view that if a
human has taken the trouble to report abuse to us, either directly
or via a semi-automated abuse reporting service such as SpamCop,
the least we can do is to handle the issue (if applicable) and update
the complainant accordingly.

We currently have two abuse deks (for two different services),
one which has an auto-responder set up and one which doesn't.  I am
thinking of retiring the auto-responder altogether as I no longer
think it serves any useful purpose (I am aware, though, that opinions
on that vary also).

A typical response to a handled complaint that we send reads as follows:

> Hi
>
> Thank you for your report concerning this Unsolicited Bulk Email
> incident.
>
> The account concerned has been identified and suspended under the
> terms of the Sky Broadband Acceptable Use Policy.
>
> Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience that this incident
> may have caused.
>
> Kind regards
>
> Anthony Edwards

That is specific, not (I hope) overly verbose, and provides detail
(more detail than most abuse desks provide, as I understand things)
of the precise Acceptable Use Policy enforcement action that has
been taken.

Replies are sent simply by hitting reply, so if a complainant's SpamCop
preferences are set to not receive responses, then (I presume?) they
shouldn't be getting any?

-- 
Anthony Edwards              *     anthony.edwards at uk.easynet.net
Abuse Team Manager           *     Tel: 020 7900 4444
Easynet Ltd                  *     DDI: 0161 888 3507
http://www.uk.easynet.net    *     Fax: 0845 333 4503