[Ietf-not43] Mail address mandatory?

[Stephane Bortzmeyer]

On Tue, Aug 13, 2002 at 08:44:04AM -0500,
 Eric A. Hall <ehall@ehsco.com> wrote 
 a message of 36 lines which said:

> The email address doesn't have to a primary account.

[Sorry, I do not understand that one.]

> The reason I made it mandatory is that there is no other form of contact
> information which is viable. Postal mail doesn't help when you are
> suffering aa DoS attack from a specific network, for example.

But phone contact helps in that case and I could say that "email does
not help when there is completely broken network configuration which
prevents email". No contact channel is 100 % reliable in every case,
that's why we must have several.
 
> There is another reason for using email addresses, which is that I plan to
> define a lookup mechanism for contacts using the email addr as the lookup
> key (EG, provide a way to find out which domains and netblocks are
> associated with <bortzmeyer@nic.fr>).

IPR people would love to have it but ordinary people (not big
corporations lawyers) may disagree. I see that as a registry policy
issue, which should not be forced by a technical protocol.

> > Anyway, it should be a matter of policy, I don't think it is
> > appropriate to put it in the protocol.
> 
> Andy has made that argument in the past, too. 

People who agree with me must be really smart :-)

> In the end, it seems to me that if there isn't any contact
> information available, there isn't any benefit to the service.

For .eu, one of the ideas was to allow people to opt-out of all but
one contact information (they have to accept that at least one among
phone, fax or email, is public).