[rfc-i] this email stuff, RFC contact addresses

[John Levine]

I have to say I'm chronically amazed at people in the IETF community
whose understanding of e-mail seems to be frozen in about 1998.  It's
kind of like getting complaints that some routing change is impossible
because RIP can't handle it.

>1) a spammer now knows the future email address of all RFC authors
>without doing the work of scraping the RFC text

The idea that a spammer would go to special effort to predict a few
thousand addresses, or that they're likely to go to any effort beyond
scraping easily visible addresses is beyond silly.  The minimum
quantum of spam list is a million addresses.  I realize that we are
all very important people here, but really, they don't care.

>If the IETF updates rfc1810 at ietf.org to point to
>touch at newaddress.example.com, then they have a way to reach me again.

Well, yes, providing people a way to contact you is the idea.

Fortunately, spam filtering has come a long way since 1998, and I see
no reason to believe that a few more forwarding addresses make an
appreciable difference to one's spam load.

> Do we really need to test that in a court?

I don't know about anyone else, but I'd be most interested to know
what your legal theory is, preferably with citations to statutes and
cases.  To help you get started, here's a handy database of
spam-related law we're building with the Cornell Law School:

http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/inbox

R's,
John