Ronald,

Can you please stop attacking ideas (such as web forms) implying that they only have malicious use cases.

> I hold them responsible because they obviously

> fail to have in place contractual clauses that would persuasively
> deter this behavior on the part of their customers.

In many cases it is practically impossible to know if your customers are sending legit emails or spam without having people reporting it.

As TLS is used in many cases now, the provider can't look at the network data to see what the customer is sending even on a technical level, disregarding any trust/potential legal issues.

> The provider in question is a perfectly lousy coder and is thus

> unable and/or unwilling to write code to parse emailed abuse

> reports.

Hi, I am actually primarily a software dev and not a network engineer, it is not even close to as easy as you make it out to be.

Sure you can have a regex to extract IP addresses and other messy things like that, but you can't be sure what that address is, it might be your customer, it might be the address they say you attacked, etc.

My point here is that parsing free form text in this way without having a clearly defined structure is far from trivial.

Also please stop assuming bad faith by saying that providers are "unwilling" to do this.

If they could drastically lower the amount of manual work needed here with a bit of code, they absolutely would in almost all cases.

> And anyway, don't actual human beings need to look at these things,

> in the end, in order to be able to react to each of them properly

> and in a professional fashion? 

Web forms can have pros and cons, I am just going to take the case of a VPS/Dedicated server hosting company.

If the hosting company provides a web form, they can have a field where they explicitly ask for the offending IP address.

This report could then automatically also be sent to the customer in question, because we shouldn't assume the customer is malicious, they might just have a bad config that made them a relay for example.

This could make it so the report is acted upon sooner potentially as the hosting company might take a few days to reply but maybe the customer can act sooner.

(I believe Hetzner as an example does this or something similar.)

> A provider that is routinely receiving so many abuse reports that

> it can barely keep up with them all has bigger problems that just
> the manner in which abuse reports are received.

Due to the automated procedure by some providers for abuse reports, if I have one bad host sending spam, I might get an abuse report for every single email they receive, so even if it is just one customer I might wake up to 200 emails.

But if I had a way to group it by sender IP address, that would be a lot more manageable.

(this was just a hypothetical example) 

Now I absolutely agree that having an abuse email address that is acted upon in a reasonable amount of time (maybe a week or so) is still essential as the web forms aren't standardised or might rely on technology like captchas.

But if you send me 200 emails about the same host in one day, I am probably still going to be mildly annoyed and I could see how this is actually unmanageable for larger providers.

I think the true solution here is just to have a standard email template or similar so providers could easily and reliably parse it automatically (at least partially).

just a very quick example that I didn't consider for more than a minute: the standard could be as easy as just beginning every report email with "abuse-host=192.0.2.20,192.0.2.21\n\n" and whatever other fields are needed.

-Cynthia

On Sun, Feb 21, 2021 at 2:51 AM Ronald F. Guilmette <rfg@tristatelogic.com> wrote:

In message <20210218200036.066496E3600F@ary.qy>,
"John Levine" <johnl@taugh.com> wrote:

>Report web forms are out of the question because they do not scale. I
>send about a hundred abuse reports a day about spam received from all
>over the Internet, and I have no interest in using your form or anyone
>else's to make a manual special case for under 1% of my reports.

I'm real glad that John posted the above comment, as he has saved me
from having to do so myself.  (But I will take this opportunity to
elaborate on what John said anyway.)

I am in 1000% agreement with John on this.  Abuse reporting forms do
not scale... at least not for the *victims* of the abuse.

I report email spams... by far the most common form of network abuse...
to dozens of different providers every week.  At the moment in time
when I send each of these reports, I have already been abused by each
of these providers.  (I hold them responsible because they obviously
fail to have in place contractual clauses that would persuasively
deter this behavior on the part of their customers.)

To make me "jump through the hoops" of first even just *finding* each
provider's unique abuse reporting web form, and then navigating it
sufficiently well to insure that I have dotted all of the i's and
crossed all of the t's, as required, uniquely, for each different
provider, just *adds* injury to the insult that I have already suffered
at the hands of these same providers, and these same networks.

The demand to use a web-based reporting form is itself a form of cost
shifting.  It shifts more of the costs of dealing with network abuse
onto the victims of abuse and away from the providfers that are actually
originating the abuse in the first place.   In that sense it is arguably
the same as spam itself.  Email spam only exists because it is a way
of shifting the costs of advertising onto the recipient and away from
the senders.  Likewise, demanding that I must find my way to, and then
properly complete *your* unique web reporting form is yet another way
of shifting the costs of dealing with *your* abuse of *my* inbox away
from yourself and onto me.  Sure, it is maximally convenient FOR YOU,
but how about a little more consideration for the victim?

As John and others have noted, if I take up *my* time and effort to
report to you abuse that is coming from *your* network, then I am NOT
doing that for *my* benefit.  Rather all of the benefits of abuse
reports flow to the network operator of the network where the abuse
originated.

I am not an imbecile, and I can easily enough block any arbitrary sender
in my own local configuration, either by full email address, or by
domain name, or by IP address range.  Thus, nothing obligates me to
report any spam, and I can easily enough prevent myself from gettting
spammed twice or more from the same source.  So how does it benefit
*me* as a spam recipient, or send in a spam report?

The answer is that it doesn't.  Period, full stop. I only do it out of
a sense of community responsibility, i.e. to do my part to help pick
up trash that other people leave lying around on the Internet.  In an
ideal world the networks/providers who are the recipients of my spam
reports would be greatful for my help in truing to keep their networks
clean, EVEN TO THE POINT WHERE THEY SHOULD PAY ME OUT OF GRATITUDE upon
receiving any professionally prepared report from me.  But they don't.
(Sigh.)  At the very least they should have the minimal courtesy and
respect to not make the task of sending them a report more cumbersome
and more tedious than it needs to be.   Web reporting forms do the
exact opposite, and they are thus every bit as anti-social as spam
itself.


Regards,
rfg


P.S.  Some providers try to justify or excuse their clearly anti-social
demand that everyone reporting abuse to them must use a web form by
claiming that they get too abuse many reports, on a regular basis, to
allow them to do anything sane or useful with such reports UNLESS they
come to them via a web form.

This is 1000% bullshit, and it indicates two things:

   1)  The provider in question is a perfectly lousy coder and is thus
       unable and/or unwilling to write code to parse emailed abuse
       reports.

       And anyway, don't actual human beings need to look at these things,
       in the end, in order to be able to react to each of them properly
       and in a professional fashion?  If so, then how does the additional
       automation of a web form even provide any real or useful service to
       *either* the originator of an abuse report *or* to the sender of
       such a report?  It doesn't, clearly.  It is just a way of maximally
       inconveniencing the originators of abuse reports, and thus to
       quite apparently deter them from reporting AT ALL.

       In fact, for me, any time a provider says to me "Oh, you need to
       use our web form to report that" I take any such statement as a
       nearly 100% reliable indicator that the provider/network in
       question is going to be routing whatever I submit directly to
       /dev/null.  Any provider that is making *any* attempt to
       "automate" abuse handling is, by definition, trying to *avoid*
       having any human ever look at abuse reports.  And it logically
       follows that any provider that is trying its best to AVOID looking
       at abuse reports will NEVER have a human look at any such, which
       in turn clearly implies that no abuse report will ever be actioned
       by that provider in any way.  (Example:  Digital Ocean.  But I can
       easily cite many many more.)

   2)  More importantly, it speaks volumes about the provider in question
       when and if he/she/it claims that they are receiving "too many
       reports" on a regular basis to allow them to be handled via email,
       rather than via a web form.

       To any and all such providers, I have a stock reply:  Oh really?

       A provider that is routinely receiving so many abuse reports that
       it can barely keep up with them all has bigger problems that just
       the manner in which abuse reports are received.