Alice reports as spam a message from Bob, either by mistake or out of
curiosity. Statistically irrelevant as this fact is, ignoring it will
convey the impression that TIS buttons represent a somewhat garbled
functionality. What should happen in an ideal case?
IMHO: The abuse report (AR) is received by Alice's server --the one
responsible for receiving. This server determines that the message had
been sent by Bob's server --the one responsible for sending. Assume
that Alice's server trusts Bob's one, then the former may forward the
AR to the latter. Bob had authenticated himself for sending that
message, hence his server can send him a warning that he shouldn't
have sent spam, with the AR attached. The readable text in the ARF may
mention the trust chain. In this case, it is Bob who determines that
this AR is an FP. He may ask for human inspection of the message,
unless Alice retracts her report. IOW, human inspection of spam is
only required in case of dispute.
Does this shed some light on the role of an external service?
Normally, if Alice and Bob have different domains, there is no trust
relationship between their servers. Therefore, Alice's server should
route the AR through the trusted external service that vouched for
Bob's server. No vouch, no FBL.
I think the "external service" /is/ the MGRS. All what it has to know
is that Bob's server is not a bot nor a spammer, although some users
there may occasionally fall into temptation. By monitoring all ARs
concerning a given MTA, it can ascertain whether its postmaster do
stop local spammers: it can both track individual ESMTPSA senders, and
determine the spam rate against the number of /good/ VBR DNS lookups.
The rest is policy (how does an MTA assess new users, how it stops bad
senders, how it solves disputes) and protocol (how to avoid multiple
FBLs in case of multiple vouchers, how to track mailing list
subscriptions, et cetera.)
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