Hi all,

Every so often this issue crops up it's ugly head again, RIPE DB abuse is a real problem. 

Yet again we are receiving unsolicited sales pitches via an e-mail address we only use for the contact details in our RIPE DB entries.

We've all seen it; people offering to buy IPv4 blocks, people offering to sell IPv4 blocks, DDoS filtering, etc. It's a plague of poorly constructed pitches for services none of us want to waste time reading about. If we want such products, we all know how find them, and yet the e-mails don't stop coming.

I am not one for publicly shaming other members of the community, but if it doesn't stop, I don't see how I have a choice. They need to learn that database abuse leads to boycott.

The database is an operations tool for de-bugging and reporting issues & abuse; not a sales team's list of "potential leads".

I hate to bring this subject up again, but is there really nothing structural we can do about this? 

At a minimum we could occlude e-mail addresses from the public DB, instead having public complaint submitted via a webform on the NCC website, requiring the uninitiated to realise this is an abuse / complaint contact, not a sales opportunity.

Thanks,

Tim.

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Tim Armstrong
Dark Lord of Network Operations
+31 6 175 444 72