Clear English – Abuse Desk

Once you have a reasonably sized network you will get abuse complaints.
It doesn’t matter what’s causing the complaints (well it does… ) but you need to be able to react quickly and deal with the issues.
I’ve mentioned my own experiences dealing with abuse desks in the past….. Now for the flipside.
Would someone please please please tell people to send clear abuse reports? Please? How hard can it be?
I was reviewing a few abuse tickets this morning and had to ask someone else to explain what the hell they were talking about!
For example this one is a classic case of bad English:

We are contacting you on behalf of XXX that is receiving objectionable traffic from your network. The type of traffic identified
is tcp port 25.

Technically it’s correct, but why couldn’t they just say:

We are receiving spam / UCE / UBE from your network

That would have been a hell of a lot easier to understand (I’ve omitted the really clumsy introductory paragraph of their email).
They’ve also included a load of rubbish about network abuse in general – we have our own AS number – thanks!
Gah!

By Michele Neylon

Michele is founder and CEO of Irish hosting provider and domain name registrar Blacknight.

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