After almost five years of work, the IETF finally chartered a new working group called MARF that will focusing on standardizing the Abuse Reporting Format that I first proposed back in 2005. This format is used between ISPs to facilitate automated reporting of spam activity.
The first draft as written by me in the beginning of 2005 after I left ASRG. The draft bounced back and forth over the last few years among an informal group of people at a mailing list maintained by Dave Crocker at MIPA. A large number of the list members were also members of MAAWG (of which I never formally participated but had the pleasure of speaking at their first conference in DC).
As I ran out of time, others have taken over the editing of the draft until the current editor, Murray Kucheraway took over. He has been very helpful in pushing for IETF standardization. A funny thing happened along the way as well – big ISPs started using the format – first AOL, then Yahoo and Microsoft.
This year, the IETF finally chartered a new working group which will now hopefully standardize this format and set it in a fixed version, so it can be used even more widely. Along with this, there is possibility of expanding different parts or uses of it as well.
A word of thanks goes out to all of the people that made this happen.