When you receive SPAM or get spam messages constantly posted in your guestbooks or other abuse issues.. do you report them to the relevant ISP or netblock owner? Or do you drop it and forget it?

Does the location of the IP often put you off reporting it? For example you get CC fraud or mail bombs from China... would you still report it?

I often get the impression that other countries might not be as strict and wonder if I waste time reporting things.

What methods do you follow? and do you report anything?

On the flip side... How do you respond to abuse reports directed to your business? For example a customer spams and someone emails saying "Terminate this account" do you reply back, terminate right away? Get both sides of the story?

I tend to look at the situation, weigh it up and then make a decision. If it's a BIG problem then the account is taken off line right away. If it's someone little petty arguement then I will get both sides of the story first. It's always a case by case scenario for me. However, we do like to respond to every abuse email that comes through to make it known we do work on these things.

What about you folks?

I tend not to bother reporting SPAM that originates from the far east as you tend to hear nothing back. US & Europe tend get reported if they've got through the SPAM filters and I've got the time.

I've never (yet) had an abuse report concerning one of my customers, so I guess I either have good customers or have been lucky I did however find a cracked copy of VB and a set of links to pirated ebooks on a server audit a while back, they were both reported and closed down (ToS violation) as they failed to comply with the copyright holders requests.

I accually just drop it and forget it for the most part. It doesn't seem like reporting anything produces real results.

As a host, how do you deal with reports of abuse that come in?

Also, in the RFCs for email - it is required that every domain has an abuse@domain email address - does your company do this? Does your hosting software support it? Do you think mail to this address should be CC'd to the host?

Some of my sites have an abuse e-mail while others don't. That's interesting though regarding the RFCs, wasn't aware of that. We have our own servers for all of our sites and my personal ones as well. This makes me the host myself. I take care of abuse reports that come in if they're legit and have enough information that I can investigate them. If I just recieve an e-mail saying "one of your customers is hosting copyrighted material" I usually reply back trying to get additional information. If the individual/company doesn't respond back with information that is usefull then I just ignore it.