The alternative, an untruthful reply, might work for a while. But eventually people are going to realize that the replies are not reflective of reality. That would not be good, either.

All in all, I think their policy of ignoring reports is probably the best consistent with their business model of hosting spammers and blaming someone else.

Scenario: A user has a shared hosting plan through a hosting reseller. That hosting reseller rents the server housing that shared hosting plan from a SoftLayer customer who provides server management. The shared hosting user’s account is compromised, and a spammer uses it to send one spam email message to 10,000 people. If 1% of those 10,000 people sends an abuse report to abuse@softlayer.com, the abuse queue grows by 100 emails for one issue.

When the abuse team gets those emails, they contact our customer about the abusive behavior. Our customer contacts their customer, and their customer contacts the user whose account was used to send the spam message. Action is taken to make sure the account is secured, so the user tells their hosting reseller who tells our customer who tells us that the problem has been resolved. In the span of time for all of that to happen, the abuse team has been notifying other customers about similar reports, and when a report isn’t resolved in the window the abuse team provides, our representatives have to take action to disable the offending server (which in a hosting reseller’s case could affect hundreds or thousands of innocent clients).

To respond to each of the 100 abuse reports we received about the one message from one domain on our network, the abuse representative would need to find our customer’s response, find all abuse reports related to that resolved issue and respond to each. The marginal time that it takes to do all of that adds up quickly at scale, and that activity would eat into the time our team could devote to processing new abuse complaints and following up with customer responses to abuse reports we’ve filed on their account.

In reality, the compromised account in this scenario would probably have sent more than one spam message before it was found and investigated, and each message would have its own abuse complaints, so the challenge snowballs.

I agree that it would be courteous to reply to each report when the issue is resolved, but doing so would affect the abuse team’s ability to operate efficiently. I don’t process hundreds of abuse reports about the same issue, so when one is forwarded to me, I’m able to get an update internally that I can share in a reply. As a department, the abuse department has to set expectations based on the service they can provide consistently and efficiently, and the process of determining what those expectations can be is far from arbitrary.

Is that context helpful?

It doesn’t take a second and it’s a common courtesy to reply to someone who has reported an issue to you. Normal, civilised people would expect a reply. What makes you think we should reset *our* expectations?!

The attitude that the general public that should adapt their to SoftLayer rather than the other way around, plus the fact that I see more than just a handful of spamcop reports heading to SoftLayer, only perpetuates the impression that SoftLayer really don’t give an abuse team at all and don’t give a ***t about preventing spam.

If we send a report to your official abuse reporting address and don’t get a response, why would we waste further time looking through forums trying to get another e-mail address to report it to? Sharing your personal address in a forum for such a purpose is admirable, but doesn’t address the problem – that your company doesn’t *appear* to be taking the original reports seriously.

I think it’s SoftLayer’s expectations that need to be ‘reset’!

–
Ross

Understanding that one of our representatives will not be sending you an email reply, you should still see action taken on your complaint. I’ve shared my email address ten times in this comment thread with the promise that I’ll help in any way that I can, but it would appear that each new comment effectively disregards the previous comments that have been posted. Again, if you’ve submitted abuse complaints to SpamCop or the SoftLayer abuse team directly and you haven’t seen results, please forward the report you submitted to those authorities to khazard@softlayer.com.

All my SPAM on Softlayer is a result of Tumblr.com spam Blogs, it makes me think SOMEHOW softlayer could BLOCK all of them but they don’t seem to be able to!!!

The mail I’m getting is regular old email spam coming from Softlayer IPs, not related to Tumblr.

On the brighter side, it looks like posting here has gotten some attention, so perhaps the spam will finally stop.

David