Changes to the ripe-dbm and auto-dbm acknowledgments

After 24 of March acknowledgments will be sent to all incoming mails send to
ripe-dbm@ripe.net. This feature was requested by the RIPE community on the last RIPE meeting.

Addition of this new feature has required changes to the way how acknowledgments are sent from auto-dbm@ripe.net. We realize that such a change may have an impact to the way how mails are processed by our customers, so here is the short description of the key changes:

• All the acknowledgments will be sent with the 'Return-Path:' set to <>
• 'From:' field will point to the unattended mail address unread@ripe.net. This should protect us from the replies of the automated mail tools and mailer daemons.

We are using the 'Auto-Submitted:' field to denote auto generated mail responses, as it is proposed in the draft RFC "Recommendations for Automatic Responses to Electronic Mail", available at:
ftp://ftp.ripe.net/internet-drafts/draft-moore-auto-email-response-05.txt

The widely recognized 'Precedence: bulk' mail header is used as well.

There are two types of acknowledgments - ACK and NOTIFY, that are send by auto-dbm@ripe.net. ACKs are sent as the direct result of the updates of the Whois data. NOTIFYs are sent in the case when the updated object has 'notify:' or 'mnt-by:' fields or when an update fails to pass authorization check. Please consult the RIPE Database Reference Manual for farther details:

http://www.ripe.net/ripe/docs/databaseref-manual.html#3.5

For the mail of ACK type:

• The 'Reply-To:' field will be set to the auto-dbm@ripe.net.
• 'Auto-Submitted:' will be set to the 'auto-replied' value.

For mails of NOTIFY type:

• The 'Reply-To:' field will be set to ripe-dbm@ripe.net.
• 'Auto-Submitted' field will be set to the 'auto-generated' value.