Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[Steven Champeon <schampeo AT hesketh.com>]

on Wed, Mar 24, 2004 at 11:08:53AM -0500, Tanner Lovelace wrote:
> Greg Cox said the following on 3/24/04 9:52 AM:
> 
> >>Can you please tell us which RFC requires the abuse@ e-mail address
> >>to exist?
> >
> >
> >Y'all can spank this around, I don't care, but, here's an annotated RFC:
> >http://www.rfc-ignorant.org/rfcs/rfc2142.php
> 
> Thank you very much Greg.  The annotations, however, are somewhat
> self-serving are they not?  For instance, the first "abuse" annotation
> cuts of the end of the sentence that defines another e-mail address.
> The other abuse annotation is in an example of something else completely
> and is not necessarily indicitive that "abuse" is an invariant.

The first abuse annotation outlines the rationale in terms of de facto
standards. The second says that for domain X, abuse@X must work. I guess
I don't see your objection.

> I'm not disagreeing that having it is a good idea, I'm just trying
> to see why they feel the need to pull that out of all the other e-mail
> addresses listed in that RFC.  What makes it better than NOC@ or
> SECURITY@ (besides the fact that abuse serves the purposes of the
> radical spam fighters).

Well, RFCi /is/ a site hosted by a radical anti-spammer, Derek Balling.
So you'd expect it to focus more on the anti-spam issues. It's a DNSBL,
too, which is used in fighting spam. The only thing that really matters
is that the address in use be standardized, so I don't have to define a
zillion aliases (e.g., abuse AT aol.com -> tosemail1 AT aol.net) or use
abuse.net. And FWIW, some older sites, like uu.net, have both abuse@
(for spam) and security@ (for break-ins, denial of service attacks,
etc.)

FWIW, Derek was an abuse desk guy at Yahoo! until Yahoo! decided they
didn't need an abuse desk.

To this day, I have a customer who gets mail for a list-owner address he
tried to shut down (along with his participation in the list) some years
ago; mail to Yahoo! trying to rectify it went unanswered, and so now I
just auto-forward all mail sent "to" that address over to Yahoo! abuse.
So far, no answer after several months of near-daily abuse reports.

Radical anti-spammers aren't born, they're made, for the most part,
through having to deal constantly with the shortsighted and ignorant
(whether it be PHBs who don't see the "value" in keeping spam out,
or with the spammers themselves, who fail to see that twenty 419 scam
messages a day for a year might not be as effective as the very first
one someone gullible ever received).

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