[anti-abuse-wg] Legal concerns, was Manual vs automated reports

On 29/07/2012 9:47 AM, Tobias Knecht wrote:
---------snip --------
> That is not the problem at all. The problem is, that a 
> user clicking on the spam button has every time he clicks 
> on the spam button acknowledge that his mail is being sent 
> to a third party. And in addition to that he has 
> explicitly acknowledge the receiver. Think about 50 spam 
> messages per day. That would mean that the a user has to 
> click 50 times the spam button, than 50 times "Yes I want 
> to report this message!" and than 50 times "I'm okay that 
> this message will be sent to X!"
>
> From a usability point this is ridiculous and exactly that 
> is one of the main problems. And in addition to that ISPs 
> would like to provide FBLs, but they do not want to annoy 
> customers with this harassment, because users would not do 
> it and as soon as there will be a way around it they will 
> not do it because they are afraid it's getting complicated 
> again.
>
> We first need to find a simple for end users secure way to 
> report that does not destroy the usability and the trust 
> and than come up with solutions. 
For myself, the number of clicks per report would not be the 
issue.
Currently, if there is an abuse address in the Whois record, 
my utility takes about ~6-10 clicks, including some 
highlighting, to send a report, something that can be done 
in a matter of seconds - not counting the ISP response time 
for sending the report e-mail.

If the Whois record does not contain an abuser address, then 
it will take considerably more clicks and time, depending on 
how determined I want to be - I do keep a log of reported 
addresses and so could follow up if it seemed expedient 
and/or necessary.

The number of clicks here is not the real issue for me.

The real issue is whether or not the receiver will actually 
fix the problem so that I won't have to repeat the 6-10 
clicks for the next so many weeks or more.

In short, I am very much in favor of _enforced mandatory 
fields_, but it is just as important to _enforce the action_ 
on these reports, otherwise they are just as useless as 
missing or misleading abuse addresses, no matter how 
'convenient' reporting might be made.

Arnold

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