JamesDR wrote:
At one point in time, I tried to send reports to some ISP's (RR,
Comcast, AOL, Bellsouth, Verizon and a few others) with no noticeable
change in the amount of spam received from these ISP's.
If such a system were implemented I'm willing to bet one automated
system will talk to another that will simply, over time, just /dev/null
the reports.
I used to do something similar, but not with spam. It was with virus
infected messages. It would send a report for each mail relay, with
stanzas for each virus laden email message that had hit my mail servers
from that relay. It did various things to try to send to the abuse
address for that relay.
For 80-90% of the messages sent, I never got any kind of response.
Of the responses I did get, the majority were dumb auto-responders.
A big chunk were ticket system auto-responders, for which I almost never
got a follow up.
The very few messages where I did eventually get a follow-up via their
ticket system, or a personal reply, were from the minor ISPs and medium
to small sized companies. I never got responses from yahoo, aol, nor
hotmail (and I stopped doing this before gmail got to be big enough to
show up on my horizon).
Mostly, the report served to fill up my own "root" mail folder with
reports. It didn't seem to actually be very useful for cleaning up the
larger problem. The main offenders, ISP wise, tended to be pretty
consistent.
