I-D (Re: Out of date contact information )

Fri May 3 05:34:32 UTC 1996

Cathy wrote:

> You know that all this stuff was standardized long ago at an IETF
> working group?  The group was called Network Joint Management.
> We all agreed that there should be a trouble mailing list for each NOC
> and I believe we agreed on AS mailing lists as well.  It is a shame,
> but I don't believe that that group ever put out an RFC specifying
> this.  There was also a group that worked on inter-NOC communications
> and sharing trouble tickets, etc.   

Because (a) Randy has taught me that drafts speak louder than words, and
because (b) BIND is eating my face today and I needed a distraction, and
because (c) it's been several hours and bmanning hasn't written a new
draft to cover this conversation, I hereby submit the following.

If it seems like the right approach (that is, all I get back are editorial
nits, "good idea please continue"'s and "you forgot to mention"'s), I will
send this to the Ops A-D's and see what they want to do with it.

   Operational Requirements Area                          Paul Vixie (ISC)
   INTERNET-DRAFT                                                May, 1996
   <draft-vixie-ops-stdaddr-00.txt>

          Standard Electronic Mail Addresses For Internet Operations

   Status of this Memo

      This document is an Internet-Draft.  Internet-Drafts are working
      documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its areas,
      and its working groups.  Note that other groups may also distribute
      working documents as Internet-Drafts.

      Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
      and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
      time.  It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
      material or to cite them other than as ``work in progress.''

      To learn the current status of any Internet-Draft, please check the
      ``1id-abstracts.txt'' listing contained in the Internet-Drafts Shadow
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      munnari.oz.au (Pacific Rim), ds.internic.net (US East Coast), or
      ftp.isi.edu (US West Coast).

   Abstract

      This draft enumerates and describes standard electronic mail
      addresses to be used when contacting the operations personnel of an
      arbitrary domain.

      As an operational standard, the recommendations herein pertain to
      vendors only inasmuch as their end user documentation should
      recommend that these mail addresses be aliased to appropriate end
      user personnel.

      This document should be advanced as a recommended standard, since
      some of the behaviour it advocates is not prevalent enough to be
      called the ``best current practice.''

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   1 - Rationale and Scope

   1.1. Several previous RFC documents have specified electronic mail
   addresses to be used when reaching the operators of the new service; for
   example, [RFC822 6.3, C.6] requires the presence of a
   <POSTMASTER at domain> address on all hosts that have an SMTP server.

   1.2. Other protocols have defacto standards for well known addresses,
   such as <USENET at domain> for NNTP (see [RFC977]), and <WEBMASTER at domain>
   for HTTP (see [HTTP]).

   1.3. Defacto standards also exist for well known addresses which have
   nothing to do with a particular protocol, e.g., <ABUSE at domain> and
   <TROUBLE at domain>.

   1.4. The purpose of this draft is to collect all of these well known
   addresses in one place, add a few new ones, and ultimately recommend
   that IANA carry these addresses in future editions of its Defined
   Numbers periodical.

   2 - Definitions and Invariants

   2.1. The scope of a well known mail address is its domain name.  Thus,
   the mail exchangers (see [RFC974]) for a domain must handle well known
   addresses even though some of these addresses might pertain to services
   not offered by the mail exchanger hosts.  So, for example, if an NNTP
   server advertises the organization's top level domain in ``Path:''
   headers (see [RFC977]), the mail exchangers for that top level domain
   must accept mail to <USENET at domain> even if the mail exchanger hosts do
   not serve the NNTP protocol.

   2.2. A host is not required to run its own SMTP server, but every host
   that implements a protocol covered by a well known mail address should
   have an MX RRset (see [RFC974]) and the mail exchangers specified by
   this RRset should recognize this host's domain name as ``local'' for the
   purpose of accepting mail bound for a well known address.  Note that
   this is true even if the advertised domain name is not the same as the
   host's domain name; for example, if an NNTP server's host name is
   DATA.RAMONA.VIX.COM yet it advertises the domain name VIX.COM in its
   ``Path:'' headers, then mail must be deliverable to both
   <USENET at VIX.COM> and <USENET at DATA.RAMONA.VIX.COM>.

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   2.3. For well known addresses that are not related to protocols, only
   the organization's top level domain name need be valid.  For example, if
   an Internet service provider's domain name is NETCOM.COM, then the
   <ABUSE at NETCOM.COM> address must be deliverable, even though the
   customers whose activity generates complaints use hosts with more
   specific domain names like SHELL1.NETCOM.COM.

   2.4. Well known addresses ought to be recognized independent of
   character case.  For example, POSTMASTER, postmaster, Postmaster,
   PostMaster, and even PoStMaStEr should all be deliverable and should all
   be delivered to the same mailbox.

   3 - Well Known Addresses

   3.1. Protocol Related Addresses

      Address      Protocol   Standard(s)
      -------------------------------------------
      postmaster   SMTP       [RFC821], [RFC822]
      usenet       NNTP       [RFC977]
      webmaster    HTTP       [HTTP]
      uucp         UUCP       [RFC976]

   3.2. Protocol Independent Addresses

      Address   Operations Area      Example Usage
      --------------------------------------------------------------
      abuse     Customer Relations   Inappropriate public behaviour
      noc       Network Operations   Network infrastructure problem
      trouble   Network Operations   Synonym for ``noc''
      support   Customer Support     Product or service not working

   4 - Other Well Known Addresses

   4.1. Many mailing lists have an administrative address to which add/drop
   requests and other metaqueries can be sent.  For a mailing list whose
   submission address is <LIST at DOMAIN>, the usual administrative address is
   <LIST-REQUEST at DOMAIN>.  With the advent of list management software such
   as MajorDomo, this convention is becoming less common and its absence
   for any given mailing list should be treated as an inconvenience rather
   than as an error or standards violation.

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   4.2. Several Internet Registries implement mailing lists for Autonomous
   System contacts.  So, for example, mail sent to <AS3557 at RA.NET> will at
   the time of this writing reach the technical contact for Autonomous
   System 3557 in the BGP4 (see [RFC1654], [RFC1655] and [RFC1656]).  Not
   all Autonomous Systems are registered with all registries, however, and
   so undeliverable addresses under this scheme should be treated as an
   inconvenience rather than as an error or a standards violation.

   5 - Security Considerations

   Denial of service attacks (flooding a mailbox with junk) will be easier
   after this document becomes a standard.

   6 - References

   [RFC821]
      J. Postel, "Simple Mail Transfer Protocol", RFC 821, Information
      Sciences Institute, 08/01/1982

   [RFC822]
      D. Crocker, "Standard for the format of ARPA Internet text messages",
      RFC 822, University of Delaware, 08/13/1982.

   [RFC974]
      C. Partridge, "Mail routing and the domain system", RFC 974, CSNET
      CIC BBN Laboratories Inc, 01/01/1986.

   [RFC976]
      M. Horton, "UUCP mail interchange format standard", RFC 976, Bell
      Laboratories, 02/01/1986.

   [RFC977]
      B. Kantor (et al), "Network News Transfer Protocol: A Proposed
      Standard for the Stream-Based Transmission of News", RFC 977,
      University of California, February 1986.

   [RFC1654]
      Y. Rekhter (et al), "A Border Gateway Protocol 4 (BGP-4)", RFC 1654,
      T.J. Watson Research Center, IBM Corp., 07/21/1994.

   [RFC1655]
      Y. Rekhter (et al), "Application of the Border Gateway Protocol in
      the Internet", RFC 1655, T.J. Watson Research Center, IBM Corp.,
      07/21/1994.

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   [RFC1656]
      P. Traina, "BGP-4 Protocol Document Roadmap and Implementation
      Experience", RFC 1656, cisco Systems, July 1994.

   [HTTP]
      T. Berners-Lee (et al), "Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.0",
      <draft-ietf-http-v10-spec-05.txt>.

   7 - Author's Address

         Paul Vixie
            Internet Software Consortium
            Star Route Box 159A
            Woodside, CA 94062
            +1 415 747 0204
            <paul at vix.com>

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