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RE: Call for review of proposed IESG Statement on Examples

2008-09-19 05:35:13
John C Klensin wrote:

1) Spam: apparently valid email addresses in an RFC are widely
believed to have been harvested and included in Spam lists.
The domain may receive spam at mailboxes other than the one
used in the example email address, if the domain name is used
in common name or brute force attacks.

Please note that a careful reading of this paragraph would
either ban or discourage the appearance of author email
addresses in RFCs.  Yet such addresses have been a firm
requirement for many years (if I recall, since before there was
an IETF).  Questions:

      (i) Does the IESG intend to change the requirement for
      email addresses?

BTW, http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc-editor/instructions2authors.txt
does not absolutely require including an email address (if you give
some other contact method, such as postal address or telephone
number), and there are RFCs that don't include it (e.g RFC 3718 
from 2004; perhaps others exist, too).

      (ii) Does the IESG believe that the appearance of a
      domain name in an email address in an example is somehow
      more harmful or likely to draw the attention of spammers
      than one in an "Author's Address" section?   If not,
      could you explain your reasoning?

If you're an author, you have presumably given your permission to 
being listed in the Author's Address section, and can choose what 
address to put there.

IMHO the crux of the proposed text is that since using email addresses
(and domains, etc.) belonging to someone else can potentially cause harm
(although usually not very serious), it's better if the owner of the
address (instead of IESG) decides whether the potential harm is
acceptable or not -- and this should be opt-in (instead of assuming
that lack of complaints means its OK). 

(There may be exceptional cases when something else needs to be
done, though.)

Best regards,
Pasi
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