I actually do side work for a nonprofit that provides free web hosting. At least with my organization, sending an abuse report will get the user’s account suspended until they can look at it. If what they were doing was blatantly illegal (e.g. a phishing site), they just get banned entirely. I’m one of 2 or 3 people who deals with the reports.
On the other side as someone sending reports, I can say that some companies care more than others. I’ve had success getting abuse taken down from 1&1, Hostinger, and Microsoft. That said, I’ve had GoDaddy, Namecheap, Cloudflare, and a few others ignore abuse reports entirely, and I had Weebly actively refuse to remove a phishing site.
My experience is that hosting companies tends to be more responsive than domain registrars at getting abuse removed, if you can figure out who is hosting the content behind the domain. The annoying part is that most just use cloudflare these days to hide the origin.
Good to see. And if there’s a setting, there’s probably a registry key behind it storing the value…it’s about 30 seconds in group policy to set it back to “Default Browser” for everyone at my company once I know which one it is.
Had to do the same thing to uncheck the “Also set up outlook on mobile device” box when Outlook initially adds the mail account last year…
MS’s main goal nowadays seems to be to find new ways to annoy users by advertising their own crap instead of producing a useful product that gets our of your way and just works.