I'll start with the tweets:

@thatcks: I see these spammers used @MailChannels to hit us once before, in April. I reported them then, but I have no time for this shit any more.

Back in April, a persistent long-term spammer of one of our addresses attempted to send it spam via MailChannels, a commercial email sending outfit. I complained to MC's abuse contacts at the time, because I'm an optimist, and someone at MC got back to me to tell me this spammer had been fixed. Then they came back now (well, a couple of days ago).

@thatcks: As has been said many, many times before, expecting the receivers of email to be your anti-spam detection method is utterly broken.

Some people might say that I should do the 'responsible' thing and once again report this incident to MailChannels. These people are wrong. It is always the sender's responsibility to detect that they are sending spam and take steps to deal with it; as has been said many years ago, abuse reports are a gift (one that comes from fewer and fewer people these days). In my case, my only real interest is in making the spam stop and generally I have far more effective ways of doing this than sending in complaints.

(By the way, I hope we can agree that there is absolutely no moral basis for saying that people have a responsibility to report spam. If your service is spamming me, I am getting absolutely nothing out of this and I accordingly owe you absolutely nothing. In fact, morally speaking you owe me for inflicting costs on me.)

In this specific situation, it's also clear that sending in complaints is not effective (cf). After all, I already did that once, got an assurance that it was dealt with, and the spammer came back a couple of months later. A repeat report is likely to net exactly the same result at best.

Then MailChannels popped up:

@MailChannels: @thatcks We don't take abuse of our network lightly and are keen to investigate. Please send us sample messages to support@mailchannels.com

This is a form tweet. It betrays at least an inability to read my original message.

(Replying to aggravated people with form tweets that betray a lack of thinking human involvement is, at the least, going to aggravate them further. So it proved here.)

@thatcks: .@MailChannels You're asking me to do more work to help you out. Why would I do that? If you want, you have enough information already.

I gave the form tweet all the response I felt that it deserved. And it's true that MailChannels has all the information they need; they could just search their April abuse reports for my name, find the address here that I reported was hit, and see if that address was sent to recently. Why yes, yes it was. MailChannels' email to it was even rejected this time around too, which really ought to be one of a number of danger signs for MailChannels. Certainly this would take some work on MailChannels' part, but you know, they're the people that this benefits, not me; I've already taken effective steps on our side.

(MailChannels benefits because they get rid of a spammer who may drag their reputation down and damage the deliverability of email for other paying customers, which would cost MailChannels money.)

Of course, I expect that MailChannels did nothing here. That's the easy way to blow off problem indicators while feeling good about yourself; you can say 'well, if it was real the person would have totally taken us up on our offer'. They can tick off the 'we tried' box and consider the matter done. And really, what mail sending service can afford to actually do a good job with spam?

(Applications of this pattern to, say, bug reports and bug trackers are left as an exercise for the reader.)