I have recently been following the advice of the TalkTalk website with regards to reporting SPAM but doing so has exposed a flaw in the reporting process.
I always make SPAM reports by forwarding the message and header details in an email and change the subject to [SPAM] or [ABUSE] as necessary, so they go to the right department. It was only after reporting several incidents, that I discovered the problem. Despite including the header information as requested, you then get sent an auto-response, that again requests the header information.
The problem is, that auto-response offers no indication as to which SPAM report the request relates to. So if you get a lot of SPAM and make a lot of reports in one go, you are suddenly faced with a large number of emails, all requesting header information but giving no idea which header information they actually want. They have a ticket number, but no cross reference to confirm the ticket number applies to a specific report.
I normally report an email and then delete it but even if I didn't, it still wouldn't let me know which ticket number applies to which report. There is no time/date information to confirm the report order so there is no assurance that the order you reported things in, is the actual order they have been registered into the system.
I actually cannot see why, after having already been presented with the header information, they would require this again but if this is how they intend to deal with SPAM, the very least they should do is to attach the initial report as a .txt attachment to the autoresponse, so you can see which report it relates to... which is exactly how many SPAM departments do things.
It's bad enough that we get so much SPAM and in return for the effort we put in to report it, it would be nice if TalkTalk lent a small hand to make things a bit easier for us.
So please, TalkTalk, alter your auto-response email to include the initial SPAM report as a text attachment... give us a hand to fight the SPAM that comes through your servers.