Re: [Asrg] ARF traffic, was Spam button scenarios

Steve Atkins <steve@blighty.com> Tue, 09 February 2010 16:44 UTC

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From: Steve Atkins <steve@blighty.com>
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On Feb 9, 2010, at 8:32 AM, Alessandro Vesely wrote:
> 
> There's a whole theory of other ARF messages that may arrive at a domain's abuse@ mailbox. A domain's user, or someone writing to a forwarded address of that domain, writes a message that is reported as spam, either correctly or by mistake. As part of an FBL or other trust-chain, the message comes back wrapped in an ARF report at the apparently originating domain.
> 
> The mailbox is abuse@domain in both cases. Although it may seem desirable to have different addresses for incoming and outgoing reports, I doubt such distinction will ever be effective. Indeed, the forwarded case is ambiguous.

If you think that any part of this chain is involving mail sent to abuse@ anywhere your model of it is a long way from how I understand the situation.

Rather there's one part of the chain that involves an end users MUA reporting a TiS button hit to their mail provider in a machine readable manner. That may well be done via SMTP, but if so it'll be to a dedicated email address (or set of email addresses) used solely for that function.

The other part of the chain involves feedback loops, which are sent in response to the TiS hit. Pretty much all current ones are sent via SMTP, but not typically to an abuse@ address (it's certainly not best practice to do it that way). Again, they're intended for entirely automated handling and so are machine readable.

Both parts of the service involve solicited, machine readable messages sent under a contractual agreement. That's very different from an abuse@ alias, which is dominated by unsolicited messages that are not intended to be machine readable.

Cheers,
  Steve