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Yes absolutely. I work in big telco and I can assure you that any decent ISP reads those abuse reports and acts on them. I have two stories I can only tell on

Yes absolutely. I work in big telco and I can assure you that any decent ISP reads those abuse reports and acts on them. I have two stories I can only tell on this anonymous account. First as a kid I was nmap scanning carelessly from my boyhood room, trying to learn. Got a letter home a few days later with a warning from my ISP and a little booklet about "netiquette". Class acts in the 90s. And fast forward to just 8 or so years ago at my current job I decide to host a service that got abuse complaints on company servers and IPs. My boss asks me if I know what's running on this VM with this IP and I had to fess up that it was me trying to use free resources. Both cases stem from an abuse report where the reporter only had the IP to report on. And actually now that I think about it, running Tor exit nodes at Linode they regularly contacted me due to abuse reports and we had to resolve them together. So yes abuse emails should work, but of course there will be exceptions.

prvit 4y ago
Abuse emails might occasionally work, but that hardly answers the question. Abuse emails can be useful to the recipient. Abuse emails do not benefit the sender in any way, there is no return on investment. It's just particularly unimpactful charity work.
- INTPenis 4y ago
  The return is that you hopefully stop or punish the transgressions that caused you to send the abuse report. But on second thought I must agree that it's probably the other way around, that people listening to abuse reports are the exception rather than the norm. I might have had some good experiences because I dealt with major ISPs in northern europe who are sticklers for the rules and processes.
  - prvit 4y ago
    > The return is that you hopefully stop or punish the transgressions that caused you to send the abuse report. How is that a return? What genuine benefit can you draw from stopping one of the thousands of internet-wide scans from stopping your server?
- ggeorgovassilis 4y ago
  Depending where you stand philosphically, I witnessed that "paying it forward" works. In this instance, if people start using whois abuse reports they will become more effective. Also, the few reports I submitted were always processed and led to (at least) a website reset.

prvit 4y ago

Abuse emails might occasionally work, but that hardly answers the question. Abuse emails can be useful to the recipient. Abuse emails do not benefit the sender in any way, there is no return on investment. It's just particularly unimpactful charity work.

INTPenis 4y ago
The return is that you hopefully stop or punish the transgressions that caused you to send the abuse report. But on second thought I must agree that it's probably the other way around, that people listening to abuse reports are the exception rather than the norm. I might have had some good experiences because I dealt with major ISPs in northern europe who are sticklers for the rules and processes.
- prvit 4y ago
  > The return is that you hopefully stop or punish the transgressions that caused you to send the abuse report. How is that a return? What genuine benefit can you draw from stopping one of the thousands of internet-wide scans from stopping your server?
ggeorgovassilis 4y ago
Depending where you stand philosphically, I witnessed that "paying it forward" works. In this instance, if people start using whois abuse reports they will become more effective. Also, the few reports I submitted were always processed and led to (at least) a website reset.