[anti-abuse-wg] [policy-announce] 2017-02 Review Phase (Regular abuse-c Validation)

Dear Brian and Nick,

On 2018-01-22 10:20:50 CET, Brian Nisbet wrote:
> > After looking at the text from the "Validation method" section of the
> > proposal, it looks like the RIPE NCC may be suggesting doing something
> > like issuing an SMTP RCPT command to see if the mail server rejects the
> > email address.  If this is the case, it is likely to provide plenty of
> > false positives albeit no false negatives.  I.e. if it fails this test,
> > then the email address is categorically not working, but if it passes
> > this test, then there is no guarantee that the email address is working,
> > for a very limited definition of the word.  Because of a lack of
> > details, is not possible to tell if this is the actual method being
> > suggested, but it is not incompatible with what is being proposed in the
> > PP document.
> 
> I would suggest that seeking clarification from the NCC about the impact
> analysis and proposed solution is a perfectly fine thing to do,
> especially if people are uncertain, so hopefully they can clarify
> further here.
> 

Thank you for your question.

An SMTP RCPT command, as Nick mentioned, will likely be one of several
checks that we perform. These checks will identify that the syntax and
format of the email address is okay, the domain accepts email, and that
the mailbox itself exists. We aim for the results to be as accurate as
possible.

As mentioned in the impact analysis, we are aware that there may be
false positives. These can be always entered into the validation process
by creating a report with our contact form:
https://www.ripe.net/contact-form

As we also mentioned in the impact analysis, a preliminary test
revealed that probably around 10%-25% of the current abuse-mailbox attributes
will not pass our planned validation check and so will need a review and
potential fixing.

I hope this clarifies.

Kind regards,

Marco Schmidt
Policy Development Officer
RIPE NCC

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