Abuse address

What it means

RFC 2142 reserves abuse for reports of inappropriate public behaviour, alongside postmaster for mail problems and security for security issues, and says that a domain offering a service must support the matching address. Networks and hosting providers also publish an abuse contact in their registration records, which is where reports about an IP address go.

Google's guidelines for email service providers ask them to offer an address for reporting abuse, such as abuse@ at the provider's domain, and to keep their contact information in WHOIS and on abuse.net current. Senders should make sure abuse@ exists on their own domains and is read, since complaints arriving there are an early warning that a list or a mailbox is being misused.