Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Is There Any Reason to Report Spammers to ISPs?

Posted by Cliff on from the does-it-do-any-good dept.

marko_ramius asks: "For years I've been a good netizen and reported spam that I get to the appropriate contacts at various ISPs. In the entire time that I've done this I've gotten (maybe) 5 or 6 responses from those ISPs informing me that they have taken action against the spammer. In recent years however, I haven't gotten any responses. Are the ISP's so overwhelmed with abuse reports that they aren't able to respond to the spam reports? Do they even bother acting on said reports? Is there any real reason to report spammers?"

3 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. yep by gregm · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If nothing else just report the spammers to irritate your ISP. If enough of us eat up our ISP's time complaining, those spammer clients of their's will seem less valuable. Also as was said before, please for the love of god report them to the block lists.

    1. Re:yep by Secrity · · Score: 3, Insightful

      PROPERLY reporting spam to the PROPER ISP is not a problem and is productive. The problems are when idiots report spam to the wrong ISP and when abusive comments are added to spam reports. For spam email it is only necessary to forward the spam email with FULL headers, and with a SHORT explanation (such as "abc.com" is on your network") if the headers do not indicate why the report is being sent to a particular ISP.

      I provided tier 3 abuse support to a large ISP and set up the abuse desk for the now defunct dialup offering of the ISP, my advice to the abuse desk people was to shitcan any abuse report that contained contained abusive comments added by the person reporting the spam. Adding abusive comments is not reporting abuse, it IS abuse.

  2. Definitely report if you have clue by Peter+Cooper · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The sad thing is that most people who report spam are the idiots of the Internet who don't understand things like joe-jobbing, etc, and assume that because it says "jkrwejkrweq@yourdomain.com" in the From field, it's not necessarily anything to do with "yourdomain.com". SPF is, supposedly, a solution to this but the penetration seems pretty low. Certainly in my experience it's not usually Hotmail or Gmail customers who send the all-caps "STOP SENDING ME E-MAIL" to joe-job victims, but people on various .com domain names most likely hosted at hundreds of different budget web hosts who have poor anti-spam tools (or none at all).