North American Network Operators Group

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Re: Best practices for [email protected] mailbox and network abuse complaint handling?

  • From: Albert Meyer
  • Date: Fri May 11 17:10:42 2007


My experience is that there's no substitute for a human abuse administrator. You can't manage your abuse queue with a script; not even a really fancy script; not even if it's so fancy that it's called a "Software Suite." You need a human (with clue about things like SMTP and email headers) to be reading the abuse mailbox so that they can recognize and deal with the complaints that represent genuine issues. For a small number of complaints this can be a small part of someone's job; for a larger number you will need one or more people doing abuse full-time. Many aspects of the abuse-handling process can be automated by a savvy abuse admin, but the abuse admin cannot be eliminated if you want to preserve your ability to appropriately respond to network incidents in a reasonable time. To see what happens when you eliminate the humans from your abuse handling, try sending an abuse complaint to yahoo or hotmail.


Outsourcing could theoretically work, but the "outside" abuse administrator would need significant access to your network to track down and deal with issues. A powerless abuse admin with no ability to fix the issues he finds would be pretty useless. I haven't seen such a service. There are email management services like Postini but they mostly just filter incoming email for spam and virii.

Here's a list of email abuse related best-practices; some of these are great; some are total crap (and some I didn't look at):

http://spamcon.org/directories/best-practices.shtml

The bestprac.org stuff looks pretty good; this appears to be relevant:

http://www.bestprac.org/principles/isp.htm

K K wrote:

Can anybody point me at best practices for monitoring and responding to abuse complaints, and good solutions for accepting complaints about network abuse? Any recommended outsourced services for processing abuse complaints?