On Fri, 26 Feb 1999, Owen DeLong wrote:
Date: Fri, 26 Feb 1999 08:55:12 -0800 From: Owen DeLong <owen@dixon.DeLong.SJ.CA.US> To: hostmaster@internic.net Cc: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Suggestion: Add contact entry to whois
We already have Admin, Tech, and Billing. Would it be possible to consider the addition of an Abuse contact in whois?
It's a decent-enough idea... but, really, the "tech" contact should be a good start... or, hell, take a guess at the web page for the company, maybe do some surfing and try to determine if the company in-question really has better contact info there for you -- many already do. Then again, WHAT do you mean by "abuse?" Chances are, for a large enough company, I'm probably going to be contacting some sort of helpdesk for pretty much anything whereas others might differentiate between security related attacks, simple spam, or other networking problems... Also, why put the burden on NetSol to maintain this sort of data for everyone? I mean, they STILL have to get each domain to give them that info at some point (what's to actually persuade someone to do it or, for that matter, make it any more "valid" than any other info that's already out there? (eg. how many clueless "tech" contacts are already out there when, by definition, these people are <supposed> to be technically competent?)) IMO, the burden for this really should lie on the domain registrant and owner. Perhaps an "abuse" address should be just as ubiquitous as the accepted "postmaster" address (though still not everyone enforces that or even reads mail to their postmaster accounts). Don't get me wrong... I think this is a problem that needs to be somehow addressed, but I don't necessarily think "whois" is the place for it. Regards, Russell -- Russell M. Van Tassell russell@cscorp.com