Unexpected abuse@ Reply

This morning when I opened mutt to see my mails, I saw the result of another trackback spam run on my weblog, 30 or so trackback notification mails, all alike. I'm all set up, so I deleted the turds in a second (trackbacks are moderated anyway, so nothing was shown online). Then I looked up the originating IPs and added them to the blocklist on the firewall. Most were open relays or zombie machines in Asia or South America. But two of them looked like more "western" addresses. I assembled some data, and fired off two quick mails to the abuse@ accounts at those domains. Something unexpected happened...

...I actually got a real reply on one of them. This is a first for me. I've had mails to providers abuse@ addresses bounce (which should never happen), vanish into a black hole, vanish into a black hole after receiving a boilerplate from an auto-reply script, or being replied by someone who doesn't know a mail server from a washing machine. This reply came from an admin who actually thanked me for pointing out the problem, and seemed to hint at getting things fixed.