My two cents... The person/company who proposed this proposal used the word "complainant" to refer to someone (anyone) attempting to report a case of network abuse to its source network administrators. Personally, speaking only for myself, I object to being called a "complainant" or a "complainer", e.g. when I attempt to do the decent thing and take up _my_ valuable time to notify responsible (?) network administrators about something I feel that they themselves may want to know about, and indeed should want to know about. Of course, the Powers That Be at many networks ... the bean counters and the higher level managers... often view _any_ communication with any party other than a paying customer as a waste of time and money, and thus, the personel underneath these folks inevitably come to develop an "us versus them" attitude which leads inevitably to viewing reports generated by outsiders, aka non-paying customers, as "complaints" and the senders as "complainers" whose only (or primary) goal is to cost the receiving company time and money, rather than the opposite, i.e. attempting to _help_ the receiving company. I would argue that it is this bean counter attitute that has itself given rise to most of the abuse on the Internet, i.e. in the time since the broad commercialization of the net in the mid 1990's. If you view receiving, understanding, and acting upon notifications of bad behavior occuring on your network as nothing other than a non-profit-generating cost sink, then you are entirely less likely to ever actually *do* anything about such reports. And when you don't, the word goes out among the bad guy communities on the Internet, and your network ends up being the source of ever more network abuse. This is just the (Darwinian) way things are. Opportunistic leeches abound. If given safe homes, they and their activities proliferate. I generally expend a good deal of time and effort writing up any abuse report I send. (Note that I say "report" not "complaint".) There are plenty of ways that various networks have dreamed up to avoid reading these "complaints", i.e. because they don't immediately or obviously generate any instantaneous revenue or profits for the receipient networks. The simplest method to avoid spending any non-profit-generating company man hours on reading abuse reports is just to alias abuse@network to /dev/null. If Virgin feels that reading incoming e-mail reports is not worth their time, then I respectfully suggest that they simply enter devnull@example.com into the abuse contact e-mail address fields for all of their relevant RIPE database records. This will be maximally efficient for all concerned. (There really is no more efficient way for Virgin to process all of their incoming "complaints". And since they _are_ clearly concerned about the efficiency of this process, that would seem to be ttheir best solution.) Regards, rfg