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 Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 4:31 AM, Alessandro Vesely <vesely at tana.it> wrote:

> 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.
>

Yes, and this is a key point.
Standard formats for abuse reporting via email will in turn allow email
client developers to embed the tech required to simplify reporting of abuse.
However by making it easier, you also increase the chances that the report
is inadvertant?  For example Gmail allow you to 'undo' reporting as Spam.
This would also need to be an option available to a user....




>
> > 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.
>

Concur, though again the use of automation means that the network provider
can turn a blind eye to it and claim that appropriate action is being
taken... it doesn't inspire folks to manually check to ensure action is
infact being taken, that reports aren't repeat in nature, etc.



>
> > 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.
>
>
My main personal frustration is that as a 'power' end-user, I read email in
various ways; serverside commandline mail program, webmail tool, various
pop3/imap tools.  At work i'm either using the COE email application or a
CRM system that manages email.  None of these will support a common,
standards-driven method of generating abuse@ reports for spam, etc, for some
time. In the meantime i'm constantly frustrated by the time that i'm obliged
to waste either a) reporting abuse in the method that ISP X demands, or b)
trashing large volumes of junk because to do anything else would taken even
_ longer_.

I'm not averse to standard (infact i'm a big fan) but i'm also a big fan of
ensuring a human remains in the loop and able to accept reports that're not
within the standard format, at least until it's reasonable to expect
_everyone_ to be using the standard format (which could take years)...

Mark.
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