[db-wg] Announcement: Changes to the ripe-dbm and auto-dbm acknowledgments

Dear Colleagues,

After 24 of March acknowledgments will be sent to all incoming mails
send to <ripe-dbm at ripe.net>. This feature was promised to the community
on the last RIPE meeting.

Addition of this new feature has required changes to the way how
acknowledgments are sent from <auto-dbm at 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 at 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 at 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 at 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 at ripe.net>.
* 'Auto-Submitted' field will be set to the 'auto-generated' value.


With best regards,
Timur Bakeyev
RIPE NCC