Dear Colleagues, After 24 of March acknowledgments will be sent to all incoming mails send to <ripe-dbm@ripe.net>. This feature was promised to the community on the last RIPE meeting. Addition of this new feature has required changes to the way how acknowledgments are sent from <auto-dbm@ripe.net>. We realize that such a change may have an impact to the way how mails are processed by our customers, so here is the short description of the key changes: * All the acknowledgments will be sent with the 'Return-Path:' set to <>. * 'From:' field will point to the unattended mail address <unread@ripe.net>. This should protect us from the replies of the automated mail tools and mailer daemons. We are using the 'Auto-Submitted:' field to denote auto generated mail responses, as it is proposed in the draft RFC "Recommendations for Automatic Responses to Electronic Mail", available at: ftp://ftp.ripe.net/internet-drafts/draft-moore-auto-email-response-05.txt The widely recognized 'Precedence: bulk' mail header is used as well. There are two types of acknowledgments - ACK and NOTIFY, that are send by <auto-dbm@ripe.net>. ACKs are sent as the direct result of the updates of the Whois data. NOTIFYs are sent in the case when the updated object has 'notify:' or 'mnt-by:' fields or when an update fails to pass authorization check. Please consult the RIPE Database Reference Manual for farther details: http://www.ripe.net/ripe/docs/databaseref-manual.html#3.5 For the mail of ACK type: * The 'Reply-To:' field will be set to the <auto-dbm@ripe.net>. * 'Auto-Submitted:' will be set to the 'auto-replied' value. For mails of NOTIFY type: * The 'Reply-To:' field will be set to <ripe-dbm@ripe.net>. * 'Auto-Submitted' field will be set to the 'auto-generated' value. With best regards, Timur Bakeyev RIPE NCC