One of our readers left us this comment last week:

“I’d be interested to know what (if any) measures you have in place to stop spammers registering their domains in the first place and/or detect spam registrations after the event.”

As your intrepid reporter, I spoke with Garrick Lau, who is driving forward several Abuse initiatives here at Tucows. Here is what I learned about how we’re stopping spammers:

Tucows has a dedicated Abuse team that monitors system logs, and abuse related activity across the our services. The Abuse team will actively disable offending spammers based on evidence found in system logs as well as complaints reported to our Customer Service team. At this time, this process is manual rather than automated.

We realize spamming and phishing are big problems. We’re in the early stages on projects to put more controls in place for automating our policy enforcement and monitoring across all our services.

Tucows is also involved in industry standards groups like MAAWG
(Messaging Anti- Abuse Working Group) to learn what others in the industry are doing to control spam and related abuse and so we can share our own experiences.

To report a spamming or phishing domain to us, please send complete evidence of the offending domain and the content of the spam message with full headers to abuse@abuse.tucows.com.