There is no other way of ensuring that it's valid on a certain moment. There is still some form of 'trust' involved as to the point that the LIR inserting the address takes abuse serious. And I hope the majority still does, so the system would work and people don't have to use other things like mailing all addresses they can find related to an address upto and including hostmaster@ripe.net.
Sorry to be picky, but I still do not get it: then what is the advantage of
abuse-c: abuse@here.there.nl
over
remarks: abuse-c: abuse@here.there.nl
as you stated trust is required and you can't ensure anything; so having it mandatory is basically worthless, because someone who has to fill in something but does not want to will put in trash_my_abuse@hotmail.com, which is also perfectly valid, but does not buy you anything either.
And for having a usable, maintainable automated system, it is easier to take what is there (IRT is not really hard to figure out - it _is_ basically like a maintainer), and write the apprpriate tools for that; since you would have to write tools anyway.
Personally I don't see the need for trust, Im sure we can all agree that no one but the LIR can enter the abuse address information (one way or the other), so the question is if any LIRs could want to falsefy an abuse address on their own inetnum object?! This is the reason why some of you keep talking about the need for trust, correct? If some LIRs need some kind of trust in order to avoid this I would suggest (as done before) that the abuse mail address is checked when creating a maintainer object. By checked I mean that Ripe NCC sends a mail to the mail address and wait for a reply before creating the maintainer object, this can actually be done with software so I don't think it will be a big burden on Ripe NCC. If this is not enough, if some LIRs fear that the LIRs in question would try to do an update and this way insert an invalid email address Im sure it wouldn't be a problem repeating the check procedure. Med venlig hilsen/Best regards Christian Rasmussen Hosting manager, jay.net a/s Smedeland 32, 2600 Glostrup, Denmark Email: noc@jay.net Personal email: chr@corp.jay.net Tlf./Phone: +45 3336 6300, Fax: +45 3336 6301 Produkter / Products: http://hosting.jay.net