On 24/Dec/10 22:44, Mark Foster wrote:
2010/12/24 Tobias Knecht <tk@abusix.com <mailto:tk@abusix.com>>
We are already working on a format, that is used by more and more people. It is meant as an extension to the well known RFC 5965 ARF. Called X-ARF. http://xarf.org
Anything that makes reporting abuse harder for the victim, is counter-productive, IMHO.
Automation is supposed to make reporting easier for the victim, not harder. Many webmail sites already have a "Report as Spam" button. It should be added to regular (POP3/IMAP) mail clients too.
This to me is all an attempt to make abuse-complaint-receivers better equipped to use automation to deal with complaints.
Yes, for the good and the bad of it. Among the goodies, it should be feasible to to route spam reports so that a network provider gets a copy and forwards it to the relevant mailbox provider, thereby allowing the former to somehow control the latter.
Noone who reports abuse likes talking to automation.
I think you mean noone who /manually/ reports abuse, as in the OP BofA case. If an abuse@ mailbox is equipped with software that recognizes automatic formats, human recipients might still be able to read the rest in the usual way. Whether a hand-written complaint should be sent to an abuse@ address depends on how report formats will take on. This consideration may explain why some organizations try and push a specific format. The abuse@ address is just mentioned by RFC 2142, but issuing a spam report does not necessarily require even SMTP, although it seems to be the most natural way of reporting email abuse. BTW, there is a third format, developed in the framework of RFC 6045.