In this afternoon's session of the Anti-spam WG we discussed the issue of publishing abuse contacts and I agreed to present this consensus view and request. As time is short this is not yet published in the minutes of the meeting, but it will be! Rodney Tillotson Chair, RIPE anti-spam WG =========================================================== The Anti-spam WG asks the Database WG to take some timely action to improve the availability of abuse contacts for IP addresses allocated through RIPE: 1. to publish an explicit abuse contact address where possible for every address; 2. to lower the profile of other addresses currently in the database and published through whois, which were never intended for the abuse function. While it is for the Database WG to decide the best way to implement such improvements, the Anti-spam WG noted that of the various technical changes which have been proposed or partly implemented, one combination which we would find acceptable is: A. modify the IRT object to include an explicit 'abuse-mail' attribute and to remove the mandatory requirement for PGP or similar authentication (or introduce a similar new object with those properties); and B. modify the default behaviour of the whois interfaces to find and present an abuse address if there is one and to suppress other e-mail addresses. 22nd September 2004. ===========================================================