Hi,
Dont forget that the abuse-mailbox is mandatory, the new abuce-c isnt (and its also hierachically).
Don't forget hierarchy. If X.0.0.0/8 has an abuse-c all ips in this range are covered. If somebody wants to handle his own abuse he can add an abuse-c as well. If the maintainer of X.0.0.0/8 does not want to be responsible he has to ask his customers to publish an abuse-c. This should cover your thoughts.
When automatic parsing is needed, your need to query several objects including IRT, remarks, abuse-mailbox (what is usally not present for networks that ARE spamming a lot) and finally personal objects to find at least one email address you could send an abuse report too.
This is exactly what should not happen in future, because the Abuse Finder API will give you the exact information you requested. If you use whois, you should use the -b option which returns only the abuse-mailbox attribute of the abuse-c. In the transitionphase this result will come up first and the other "old" results will come up if the first result is not possible to find. Later on there is only the mailbox attribute coming from an abuse-c.
And personal objects ARE restricted, what compicates things a lot.
As well this should not happen any more. Before sending the report to a personal address you should use hierarchy and go up one level and report things to this level. They can take care in whatever way they find it would be appropriate.
Ok, so lets restrict access to personal objects even more and lets have a non mandatory and public abuse-c without any restriction.
I do not get the point why data other than abuse-mailbox would be needed in an unrestricted way. The abuse-c will be mandatory for at least the highest allocation, which gives you an abuse-mailbox attribute for every single ip address. So why would we need an unrestricted email-attribute, phone number, street and name of the object?
And I still like the idea of an "preferred contact method" field, so we can decide what format to use automatically.
There is a project working on this as a DNS based service in the IETF ARF Working Group. I'm absolutely against defining formats in the whois database. I could accept channels as soon as there are other channels finding their way in the everydays life of an abuse department. Putting formats into the whois things get polluted with stuff that has nothing to do in the whois. And second keeping this up2date is a pain. An abuse department does probably not want to get on NOCs people nerves and requests updates every once in a while. Thanks, Tobias -- abusix