Stephen Samuel's Journal: abuse.net via DNS

Abuse.net is a nice idea.... sending an email to [e-mail] will cause abuse.net to look up thee email address for the appropriate domain (some.domain) and forward the email there. ([e-mail])

A slightly diferent way to accomplish this would be to make the abuse.net data available via DNS...

some.domain.mailbase.abuse.net could return a TXT record saying '[e-mail]'. A mailer built to support this method would then send the email directly to [e-mail] These lookups could be cached at various DNS servers, thus distributing the load on abuse.net for oft-(ab)used domains.

This does require specially crafted mailers, but -- as the method becomes more widespread, it could noticably reduce the load for abuse.net. This can be more generically viewed as a way to store a distributed per-domain database of relatively arbitrary data.