Just to add my $0.02 to this discussion and a disclaimer - I've known
Emil for years, I've seen his shop and even the controversy.
200 Paul is a small community, and most of the folks in there know
eachother, I've been in there since 2001 or so.
Intercage is not a big shop, there are very few people involved in running
it and I have a very hard time believing the accusations made by some
of the folks around. I also don't believe Intercage was complicit in any
net-crime; Thats not to say it didn't exist, but more along the lines
of they got lost in the noise of running a business. I'd guess that
given the server volume they've got, abuse emails are less than one percent
of all the email they get in a week. From what I've seen, the bulk of their
customer base is webhosters, Unix Shell providers and some video/audio
streamers. Were I to venture a guess on the number of folks reselling
those webservers, its probably on the order of thousands...
Any time I've had an issue with one of Atrivo's customers, it only took
one email to get it dealt with, or I got Emil on IM or on the phone and
it was taken care of.
My experience with being on the other end of abuse@, I'd say a good
60-75% of the complaints I saw coming in were bogus. Either people
complaining about their ZoneAlarm's going off, people complaining
about bounced emails with spam and a bunch of automated stuff that was
always wrong. The legit complaints were not always easy to deal with
either since a good 20-30% of them were unclear on what was actually wrong
until you spent some time digging.
Basically is what it boils down to for me - its easy to blame
an NSP/ISP/Hoster for what their clients do, it takes real dedication to
find out whats *actually* going on.
--
Tom Sparks
(415) 367-7328x1001
