[anti-abuse-wg] Spam FAQs need revision

Hi Wout!

On 13/Dec/11 11:09, Wout de Natris wrote:
> 
>> -- "Should I just ignore spam?"
> 
> On the spam should be ignored discussion. It's time people realised
> and acted upon the fact that by reporting spam and all the
> content/fraud/phishing/malware related with spam to spam reporting
> centres and/or authorities, maybe just something will change.

Agreed, ignoring spam will only allow changes for the worse...

> Somewhere in this data the identity of the spammers lies hidden,
> including the data of all involved, whether consciously or
> unconsciously. Also countries or agencies less active will be
> revealed. Transparency is what this discussion needs and that may just
> prove half of the much needed silver bullet. Without reporting there
> is no analyses of data.

The data only reveals the (first) covering screen, but it is indeed
true that headers, which are crucial for identifying senders, are
usually hidden from "naive users".  Users have to be trained to report
messages integrally.  But then doing so they may expose more data than
they may want.  Mailbox providers are in the best position to tackle
this issue, because they know exactly where their SMTP software stores
the relevant data.  Moreover, they know their users and have a trust
relationship with them, sort of.

> So please change the topic to report spam actively where possible. And
> perhaps even add that if there is no spam reporting centre in a
> country, to lobby to your local government to start one.

IMHO, mailbox providers should be the first recipients of naive users'
reports.  Gov's agencies already pester ISPs whenever they miss any
grip for controlling the Internet.  Why shouldn't they arrange to get
spam complaints from cooperating mailbox providers?

>> Message: 2
>> From: "Joe St Sauver" <joe at oregon.uoregon.edu>
>>
>> I'd like to suggest that users report spam to appropriate government
>> agencies, see for example:
>> http://spamlinks.net/track-report-addresses.htm#country

Some of those links lead to 404 failures.  Some are bare email
addresses whose owners are probably unaware of that publication.