On Mon, Jan 12, 2004 at 08:45:09AM +0100, Daniel Karrenberg wrote:
Realistically speaking it is not very likely that stupid tools will change very soon. Nonetheless I like the proposal of a simple 'abuse-mailbox' attribute containing an e-mail address and nothing else. This would open the possibility to ask tool-writers not to spam all the other e-mail addresses in the inet*num objects and any object remotely related to them. In other words: we provide specific information where to send such messages, so it is a Bad Idea(TM) to send it anywhere else.
I do not think we should make this attribute mandatory however, as introducing mandatory attributes is difficult in existing objects that have significant deployment. Furthermore making an attribute mandatory tends to decrease its meaningfulness somewhat as people fill in 'anything' if they do not have meaningful data to provide. Preventing general spam from stupid tools and getting abuse e-mail concentrated in one mailbox should be enough motivation for deployment.
I am also in favour of adding the 'abuse-mailbox' attribute to the maintainer object in order to provide a quick way for deployment that does not involve changing a lot of inet*num objects. The referencing recommendation should be: "If the inet*num object for the address concerned has an 'abuse-mailbox', use this address *only* for sending abuse complaints. If such an attribute is not present, check the maintainer object for an 'abuse-mailbox' attribute and use this address *only* for sending abuse complaints."
I totally agree on this, this will give a clear and easy to understand/implement mechanism for people writing whatever tool to find abuse handling addresses. Grtx, MarcoH