Option to lookup abuse records via IP owner whois instead of domain WHOIS

[RobbyZ]

I would like an option to contact the IP owner's abuse address, as this often results in action taken in my experience.

(In addition, there may be situations where you don't want to confirm your e-mail address is valid with the spamming server by contacting them directly, and would rather contact their ISP.)

Domain vs IP results

For example, today I got a spam like this:

Received: from vmta00.sender3.mailsdeliver.com (vmta00.sender3.mailsdeliver.com [159.223.238.39])

Domain WHOIS as currently implemented:

• Only abuse contact listed is Go Daddy behind privacy filter, which likely is not going anywhere (and also requires manual retyping, ugh) 👎

Abuse.net (as in #23)

• Returns no information, so makes a blind attempt at abuse@mailsdeliver.com (spammer domain) 👎?

IP WHOIS (via ex dnschecker.org or ipinfo)

• Abuse contact at the spammer's host - abuse@digitalocean.com (who is much more likely to forward on and action the spam report) 👍

SpamCop.net

• Same as IP WHOIS (just with more steps) 👍?

Why not just use SpamCop?

I tried SpamCop today, and ran into numerous problems:

• Problems getting it to work via forwarding mail (I will post in other issue about this)
• Spamcop wants to inform anyone the e-mail has a href link to (for instance, amazon, google, etc). This seems pointless and spammy in of itself. Notifying only the IP owner requires many clicks if there's a lot of web links
• Using the manual copy-past results in a nag delay screen in order to get people to send money to cisco
• It can take a while to get the spamcop message processed. Like half an hour or an hour. At this point, I may be done with emails for the day
• It's a lot of extra clicks beyond just sending to ip owner in the first place.
• In one of my handful of tests, spamcop didn't even want to send e-mails to one of the IP owners. It recognized sendgrid, but then only wanted to send to a dev-null address abuse#sendgrid.com@devnull.spamcop.net I have actually reported a number of spams to sendgrid before and gotten good action, so I'm not sure why they block it.

[nicprov]

@RobbyZ I will mark this as a possible enhancement since this is a pretty big feature (requires both client changes and server changes).

I will admit though, the WHOIS lookup is lacking and often inconsistent. Domain registars aren't always quick (or even willing) to ban a domain. So this feature does make sense. I'm mainly curious to see how many people actually want this since I believe that the majority of the people using this add-on report exclusively to SpamCop.

[RobbyZ]

Fair, though I would posit it's kind of a chicken & egg situation. IE, there may be new users that are not currently using the plugin because it's primarily useful with SpamCop, and not currently very effective for direct reporting. In other words, if the plugin were made to be also useful for direct reporting, it may lead to an expanded userbase.