[anti-abuse-wg] Question about spam to abuse inbox

Hello all

First of all, I'm glad Cynthia opened this discussion, as it's a
typical complaint for requiring abuse mailboxes. It's good to have a
healthy discussion about that.

With regards to the query itself, I do think it is acceptable to block
the sending email. If after manual inspection those messages have
absolutely no reason to be there (automatically sent spamming mails), I
think it may be ok to block further messages from that sender.

You could do as Jordi suggests and notify the abuse contact of the
sender as well, warning them that you may proceed to block further
messages from that sender (so at least you warned them, even though
it's probably ignored).

As for the block itself, I can see reasons for doing it both at the
incoming MTA, so it shows a rejection reason on why they are not
allowed access to the abuse mailbox, or at the last level, where the
email is received and stored (so you have those evidences if needed)
but otherwise ignored.


Please note that blocking based on the sender (mail envelope or From:
header) after evidence of directly being spammed from them is quite
different than filtering based on *content*.
That one is much more problematic, since those filters would typically
match as well reports of such abuse coming from your network, which
is precisely the kind of thing you want to be reported. Not to mention
the irony that you send those mails but would avoid receiving them
yourself.
I'm not aware of a way of telling apart the real abusive message vs
someone reporting the abuse message (specially when sent by end-users). 
You could try to detect specific cases, but I suspect that would still
be prone to false positives.


Best regards


El jue, 18-02-2021 a las 13:57 +0100, JORDI PALET MARTINEZ escribió:
> In my experience, this is something you need to live with, and not
> filter anything in the spam folder.
>  
> Why? Because it can be real spam (and then you can use the abuse
> contact of the resource-holder for the addresses where the spam is
> coming from), when you report abuse cases, to facilitate the work of
> the involved parties, you should be allowed to attach or include
> headers, logs, etc. that probe that it is an abuse (from your
> perspective).
>  
> If you filter that, then you will not receive many abuse reports …
>  
> For example, some abuse mailboxes filter specific URLs or domains. If
> the header contains such domain, how are you going to be able to send
> that?
>  
> I use fail2ban and block automatically specific IP addresses or
> ranges once the abuse has been reported and keeps repeating.
> Depending on the frequency of the repetitions, how many, etc., etc.,
> I could increase automatically from a few hours to days or weeks the
> banning.
>  
> Regards,
> Jordi
> 
> @jordipalet
> 
>  
> 
>  
>  
> El 18/2/21 13:40, "anti-abuse-wg en nombre de Cynthia Revström via
> anti-abuse-wg" <anti-abuse-wg-bounces at ripe.net en nombre de 
> anti-abuse-wg at ripe.net> escribió:
>  
> Hi aa-wg,
>  
> For some context, today and yesterday I have been receiving spam in
> the form of fake abuse notices to my abuse contact email address.
>  
> Is there a generally accepted standard for when it's okay to block an
> address or a prefix from emailing your abuse contact?
>  
> I consider being able to contact the abuse email address of a
> network a rather important function, so I prefer not to block it.
> But also as I have more relaxed spam filters for the abuse contact to
> make sure nothing gets lost, it feels like blocking the
> address/prefix is my only option other than manually filtering
> through these emails (10 so far in total, today and yesterday).
>  
> So back to the question, is there a generally accepted point at which
> blocking an address/prefix is fine?
>  
> Thanks,
> -Cynthia
> 
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