I mean, you know the ones…abuse@ somedomain.com or abuse@ somewebhost.com. etc. These are the email accounts that one would send an email to to report any bad behavior discovered about a particular web site or spam coming from some server somewhere.

Well, I tried that the other day because I’d noticed an increase in spam comments and trackbacks and wondered just where these were coming from. So I started clicking on the IP address listed along side each one to discover where they were from. It got interesting.

I had some from Chicago, Amsterdam, Australia, Florida, Texas just to mention a few. Hmm, OK. Let’s see what would happen if I emailed the respective accounts for abuse and reported the spam.

The majority of responses I got were all in the form of some automated reply requesting more information like full headers and the entire email I received. Huh? No email here…just spam comments and trackbacks. Typical response but totally ineffective because even though I replied with what information I had…I never heard back again.

Except for one lone web host who actually contacted a customer about my email and obviously forwarded it to him. I say this because he replied to my email by way of the Tech at the hosting company. Twice!

First he wanted the URL to my blog (supposedly to be able to block it on his proxy site) and the second was when I replied back that in no way, form or fashion would I send him the URL (probably wind up with even more spam) but would provide the IP address. His suggestion was and I quote:

Might want to tell him that having a blog means you get a lot of spam,
just to suck it up and get a spam filter.

So much for that abuse@ whatever.com.

Now I’m not so naive that I’d believe a quick and dirty email to the web host would bring instant relief however, I would expect that the matter was looked into in a more professional manner instead of my complaint being forwarded to the originator and being snubbed.

We all know that most all blog software has some form of spam blocking whether it be a plugin or built in. My point in this exercise was to see what would happen when it was reported to the web host. Depending on the company….either not much or none at all.

So, what would you think would be a good solution here? Have any of you tried to contact a web host about an abuse issue? What was the outcome? Was it remedied to your satisfaction? Was it an email issue or some other type of abuse complaint?