[Apologies for duplicates] Dear Colleagues, With most updates to the RIPE Database, notification messages are sent out. Many of these notifications are hitting users' ticketing systems or arriving in mailboxes with auto-responders. The "Reply-to:" address in these notifications was <ripe-dbm@ripe.net>. Our help desk ticketing system was receiving hundreds of e-mails a month from these auto-responders. This was causing a serious operational problem for our Customer Services Department. To solve this problem, we have changed the e-mail header in the notification messages we send out. They now have the "From:" and "Reply-to:" addresses set to <unread@ripe.net>. As the name suggests, any replies to this address are not read by anyone and they are just dropped from our mail system. We have also made a small change to the introductory text to make it clear that these e-mails are auto-generated. We also clearly show users the e-mail reply address to use if they have an issue with the notification. This change was implemented today. It should not affect any users unless they parse the mail headers or the introductory text in the notification. Examples of the old and new notification messages are shown below. Regards, Denis Walker Business Analyst RIPE NCC Database Group Old notification message ____________________________________________________ To: user@somewhere.com From: RIPE Database Notifications <bitbucket@ripe.net> Subject: Notification of RIPE Database changes Reply-To: ripe-dbm@ripe.net Precedence: bulk Auto-Submitted: auto-generated Dear Colleague, This is to notify you that some object(s) in RIPE database which you either maintain or are listed as to-be-notified have been added, deleted or changed. The update causing these changes had the following mail headers:
From: user@somewhereelse.com Subject: Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2008 00:00:18 +0200 (CEST) Reply-To: user@somewhereelse.com MsgId: <2008061622>
For assistance or clarification please contact: RIPE Database Administration <ripe-dbm@ripe.net> New notification message ____________________________________________________ To: user@somewhere.com From: RIPE Database Notifications <unread@ripe.net> Subject: Notification of RIPE Database changes Reply-To: unread@ripe.net Precedence: bulk Auto-Submitted: auto-generated Dear Colleague, This is to notify you that some object(s) in RIPE database which you either maintain or are listed as to-be-notified have been added, deleted or changed. This message is auto-generated. Please DO NOT reply to this message. If you do not understand why we sent you this message, or for assistance or clarification please contact: RIPE Database Administration <ripe-dbm@ripe.net> The update causing these changes had the following mail headers:
From: user@somewhereelse.com Subject: Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2008 00:00:18 +0200 (CEST) Reply-To: user@somewhereelse.com MsgId: <2008061622>