[RFCI-Discuss] Posit: abuse@aol.com

[Derek J. Balling]

$VICTIM knows who he/she is, and should stay out of this discussion  
for the first 24-48 hours. I want to hear unbiased responses. :-)

Posit:

-	$VICTIM is the recipient of between one and two thousand  
illegitimate messages from AOL.com mail servers, crushing them

-	After failing to get anyone at AOL's attention, $VICTIM configures  
their system to generate an e-mail to abuse at aol.com for each  
individual message of those 1500+ messages

-	AOL.com, after $VICTIM'S_IP (or maybe e-mail address, don't know),  
sends "N" messages, views this as an attack and ceases accepting  
abuse@ messages from this IP/address.

-	$VICTIM requests (there's no submission yet, so don't bother  
looking) that we list AOL.COM in the abuse zone


.... is aol.com rfc-ignorant for the abuse zone?

The yes argument:

	Each individual message is relevant to an abusive message. If AOL  
wants to generate abuse at "X" rate, they need to be prepared to  
accept complaints about it at "X" rate.

The no argument:

	Rate limiting, for situations like this, is perfectly normal and  
acceptable. It's impossible, or extremely technically difficult, to  
differentiate between "the person who is attacking/spamming our abuse  
address" and "the person who is sending us thousands of extremely  
similar messages, each one of which is itself a legitimate complaint".


Discuss amongst yourselves.

Cheers,
D

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