If you want to report abusive behavior,
you need to report it to the system where the
abuse originated.
DO NOT SEND ABUSE REPORTS TO
ABUSE.NET.
The abuse.net system helps you find the addresses
of people who can do something about abusive activity.
It's not a blacklist, nor is it a spam analysis service.
It's up to you to determine who should get your complaint.
If you're complaining about junk e-mail,
the From: header on spam is almost always forged,
so you need to look at other header information to figure out who's
responsible.
See
Where do I complain? on the left.
Use this web page or a lookup tool (see below) to find our suggested
contacts for a domain responsible for abusive mail, and send them
a spam report.
For many domains the contact is
postmaster@
domain-name, for some it's abuse@
domain-name, for some it's
something else. Some particularly unpleasant domains ignore all their
mail; when we're aware of that we use the address for their next-level-up
provider.
When we don't know anything about the domain, by default we suggest
postmaster at that domain and all suffixes of that domain, so if you
sent mail to a.b.com@abuse.net, we'd suggest postmaster@a.b.com
and postmaster@b.com.
Not being omniscient, we don't know about every domain on the net.
You can check
our current list.
If you have contact information for a domain not in the database,
see
How do I submit contact information for a domain?
Tips for reporting abusive usenet or e-mail messages
-
You can't just remail or bounce the abusive message; anything you send
should be from you, with your real return e-mail address.
Use your mailer's Forward command, and add a line or two explaining why
you find it abusive, e.g. ``This is unsolicited commercial e-mail. Please
make your user who is sending it stop.''
-
Include a copy of the entire abusive message, including all of the
header lines, particularly the "Received:" lines. (Many mail programs
including Outlook Express,
Pine and Eudora don't show or send all the headers unless
you specifically tell them to.) If the message is very long, you can
cut off the message in the middle, so long as you're sure you're
sending all the headers.
- Be polite and to the point.
Don't include a lecture on why spam is bad, providers already know and it
just wastes time they could spend acting on your complaint.
- If you get an unsatisfactory response or no response from the
responsible party, you can contact (again politely) the party's
upstream Internet provider.
- Don't make any threats unless you intend to carry them out.
In particular, don't cite 47 USC 227 unless you plan to file the
test case that conclusively proves that the junk fax law doesn't apply
to e-mail.
How Can I use the abuse.net database ?
There are two ways to query the database directly.
You can use the
web look-up page to see what
addresses abuse.net would send mail to, the new
DNS based service at contacts.abuse.net,
or else use the WHOIS server at whois.abuse.net.
(Note: DNS and WHOIS are not web pages or web sites.
The only abuse.net web site is this one www.abuse.net.)