From: Valdis(_dot_)Kletnieks(_at_)vt(_dot_)edu
...
I read it as saying "We suggest you have aliases from section 3 for
appropriate business units, and the service-oriented ones from section
5 are mandatory if you run that service". So if you have a sales
division, a mailbox called 'sales' is suggested, but if you have a
webserver, you *have* to have a 'webmaster' mailbox.
I notice that you don't say you "MUST" have a webmaster mailbox,
which is good for more than one reason. One is that "MUST" appears
only once in section 6 concern mailing lists. Another is that today
webmaster(_at_)domain(_dot_)com essentially never receives anything but spam.
Contrary to some who advocate rejecting mail from sites that don't do
what they call complying with RFC 2142, I read it as saying:
If you're going to offer these services, then you probably want
to receive comments about them. If you do want to receive
comments, then you'd better use these mailboxes, because that's
where people will send their important notes about your services
as well as offers about mortgage loans and other vital issues.
The purpose of every RFC is to improve interoperability. The familiar
claims that not having an abuse mailbox justifies breaking SMTP
compatibility purely on grounds of Violation of Standards (Horrors!)
make sense only to people who don't read or care about those standards.
The First RFC Standard is "Be Conservative in what you send and generous
in what you accept," which implies that breaking compatibility on
legalistic grounds is always worse.
It makes sense to reject mail because of an observed a correlation
between spam and odd IP addresses, domains without about abuse
mailboxes, or anything else. Security trumps interoperability.
If you press supporters of rfc-ignorant.org, they'll claim something
like that as justification. However rfc-ignorant.org also lists
spamhaus.org. Mr. Balling admits there has never been and never
will be spam from spamhaus.org and falls back on something incoherent
about a violation of RFC 2142. Because of its name and because of
expressions of displeasure from spammers about the SBL, spamhaus.org
gets far too much junk at the standard mailboxes to do other than
have auto-responders that describe real contact methods.
You should do whatever you think is right while ignoring the sidewalk
superintendents, poseurs, would be famous spam fighters, kooks, trolls,
spammers, and other parasites.
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com