Re: [ga] whois: issues with uniformity

[Vittorio Bertola <vb@bertola.eu.org>]

On Fri, 27 Dec 2002 13:34:28 +0100, you wrote:

>Let's expand a typical "daily routine business". You receive a spam
>which advertises an email address in hotsex@coldmail.com. You want to
>complain to the people at coldmail.com. It is very convenient to find
>an email address.

RFC822 mandates that postmaster@domain must exist and be read by a
person who is responsible for all e-mail activities for that domain -
which indeed include spamming. Why should you have to search for
another address?

Anyway, I agree that being able to contact the owner of a domain is a
good thing - so you could either mandate the publication of an e-mail
contact address for the domain, or have a redirection mechanism
through the registry/registrar (i.e. the e-mail address remains
private, but the registry/registrar offers you a web form through
which you can send an e-mail to the domain owner, without having to
know its e-mail address - however this would place additional costs on
the registries, so this should be examined more in deep). But this
does not require for your full name, postal address and phone number
to be exposed to the whole world.

>> breach of law, you can go to the police - they should have
>
>Do note that, of the typical situations I gave as example, only one is
>a (possible) breach of the law.

You should not be allowed to trace someone who is not breaking the
law. If someone wants to publish his address so that you can help him
in case of need - for example, if he misconfigurates his name servers
- he could do it, but he should have the option to preserve his
privacy at the cost of losing your advice when, for example, you
notice that his domain can't receive e-mail due to DNS errors. (If he
is really using that domain, however, he will likely notice by himself
that he can't get e-mail before you do.)
-- 
vb.            [Vittorio Bertola - v.bertola [a] bertola.eu.org]<---
-------------------> http://bertola.eu.org/ <-----------------------
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