[anti-abuse-wg] abuse-contact is not going to fly unless we get all the legitimate players adopting it first

> -----Original Message-----
> From: anti-abuse-wg-bounces at ripe.net [mailto:anti-abuse-wg-
> bounces at ripe.net] On Behalf Of Suresh Ramasubramanian
> Sent: Wednesday, April 25, 2012 5:24 AM
> To: rezaf at mindspring.com
> Cc: anti-abuse-wg at ripe.net

> On Sun, Apr 22, 2012 at 10:04 PM, Suresh Ramasubramanian
> <ops.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Of course. But as they are careful enough to inform people
> through
> > their whois that they will reject reports going to these other
> > addresses ..
>
> This is amazing. So reza had cc'd hostmaster at chello.at in his email
> -
> and I hit reply all.  Now - it seems they don't seem to accept
> email
> at their hostmaster address either.

> Original-Recipient: RFC822;<hostmaster at chello.at>
> Final-Recipient: RFC822; <hostmaster at chello.at>
> Action: failed
> Status: 4.4.7
> Remote-MTA: dns; surf0n.vienna.chello.at
> X-Actual-Recipient: RFC822; <hostmaster at surf0n.vienna.chello.at>

Having a working abuse address is but a technicality. All mail sent to the 
address could still be handled by Mr Null. Another possible approach is this 
one:

Final-Recipient: RFC822; abuse at romtelecom.ro
Action: failed
Status: 5.0.0
Remote-MTA: DNS; it11.romtelecom.ro
Diagnostic-Code: SMTP; 554 rejected due to spam content
Last-Attempt-Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2012 18:07:50 +0300

Even if the RIPE NCC would check abuse addresses by sending some kind of 
challenges, those messages might not trigger the spam filter of the 
Romanians, instead returning an OK result.

Black hat providers will always ignore abuse reports (or use them to improve 
their spam lists), so having an abuse address that works on the SMTP level 
is just a beginning, useless on its own.

-- 
Thor Kottelin
http://www.anta.net/