Among other things, I run the abuse desk for a large service provider with lots of clients. We get a handful of complaints a day. For example, over the past three days, we’ve received about sixteen complaints. And about two hundred spams.
The “fun” part of our job (for various values of “fun”) is going through the abuse mailbox and separating the wheat from the chaff every day. More than 90% of that inbound mail stream is spam. Just random, stupid spam emails from people dumb enough to send spam to an abuse desk. We take turns taking out the trash, moving this mail out of the way so that we can focus on the actual, actionable reports that need to be reviewed and investigated.
How can I reduce the amount of spam our abuse desk receives? I’ve used a lot of different blacklists over the years to reduce the amount of spam received. Problem is, most of them have some level of false positives associated with them. I don’t ever want to knowingly reject a complaint from somebody trying to report abuse from one of our users.
If you run an abuse desk that gets a lot of spam, how do you deal with it? I’d love to hear your thoughts. And if you’re in the same boat as me, and wondering what to do? It might be worth your while to tag the mail with Spamhaus ZEN. I think you’ll find that it’ll correctly identify most of the spam, and that false positives, if any, will be few and far between.