Operational Requirements Area Paul Vixie (ISC) INTERNET-DRAFT May, 1996 <draft-vixie-ops-stdaddr-00.txt> Standard Electronic Mail Addresses For Internet Operations Status of this Memo This document is an Internet-Draft. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as ``work in progress.'' To learn the current status of any Internet-Draft, please check the ``1id-abstracts.txt'' listing contained in the Internet-Drafts Shadow Directories on ftp.is.co.za (Africa), nic.nordu.net (Europe), munnari.oz.au (Pacific Rim), ds.internic.net (US East Coast), or ftp.isi.edu (US West Coast). Abstract This draft enumerates and describes standard electronic mail addresses to be used when contacting the operations personnel of an arbitrary domain. As an operational standard, the recommendations herein pertain to vendors only inasmuch as their end user documentation should recommend that these mail addresses be aliased to appropriate end user personnel. This document should be advanced as a Best Current Practice, since it describes what the current practice is and should be. Expires November 1996 [Page 1]
INTERNET-DRAFT STD ADDR May 1996 1 - Rationale and Scope 1.1. Several previous RFC documents have specified electronic mail addresses to be used when reaching the operators of the new service; for example, [RFC822 6.3, C.6] requires the presence of a <POSTMASTER@domain> address on all hosts that have an SMTP server. 1.2. Other protocols have defacto standards for well known addresses, such as <USENET@domain> for NNTP (see [RFC977]), and <WEBMASTER@domain> for HTTP (see [HTTP]). 1.3. Defacto standards also exist for well known addresses which have nothing to do with a particular protocol, e.g., <ABUSE@domain> and <TROUBLE@domain>. 1.4. The purpose of this draft is to collect all of these well known addresses in one place, add a few new ones, and ultimately recommend that IANA carry these addresses in future editions of its Defined Numbers periodical. 2 - Definitions and Invariants 2.1. The scope of a well known mail address is its domain name. Thus, the mail exchangers (see [RFC974]) for a domain must handle well known addresses even though some of these addresses might pertain to services not offered by the mail exchanger hosts. So, for example, if an NNTP server advertises the organization's top level domain in ``Path:'' headers (see [RFC977]), the mail exchangers for that top level domain must accept mail to <USENET@domain> even if the mail exchanger hosts do not serve the NNTP protocol. 2.2. A host is not required to run its own SMTP server, but every host that implements a protocol covered by a well known mail address should have an MX RRset (see [RFC974]) and the mail exchangers specified by this RRset should recognize this host's domain name as ``local'' for the purpose of accepting mail bound for a well known address. Note that this is true even if the advertised domain name is not the same as the host's domain name; for example, if an NNTP server's host name is DATA.RAMONA.VIX.COM yet it advertises the domain name VIX.COM in its ``Path:'' headers, then mail must be deliverable to both <USENET@VIX.COM> and <USENET@DATA.RAMONA.VIX.COM>. Expires November 1996 [Page 2]
INTERNET-DRAFT STD ADDR May 1996 2.3. For well known addresses that are not related to protocols, only the organization's top level domain name need be valid. For example, if an Internet service provider's domain name is NETCOM.COM, then the <ABUSE@NETCOM.COM> address must be deliverable, even though the customers whose activity generates complaints use hosts with more specific domain names like SHELL1.NETCOM.COM. 2.4. Well known addresses ought to be recognized independent of character case. For example, POSTMASTER, postmaster, Postmaster, PostMaster, and even PoStMaStEr should all be deliverable and should all be delivered to the same mailbox. 2.5. Most domains do not need the full set of well known addresses, since not every domain will implement the protocols or offer the service described by every well known address. If a given service is offerred, then the relevant well known address(es) ought to be deliverable at all advertised domain names. 3 - Well Known Addresses 3.1. Protocol Related Addresses Address Protocol Standard(s) -------------------------------------------------------- POSTMASTER SMTP [RFC821], [RFC822] HOSTMASTER DNS [RFC1033], [RFC1034], [RFC1035] USENET NNTP [RFC977] WEBMASTER HTTP [HTTP] UUCP UUCP [RFC976] FTP FTP [RFC959] 3.2. Protocol Independent Addresses Address Operations Area Example Usage --------------------------------------------------------------- ABUSE Customer Relations Inappropriate public behaviour NOC Network Operations Network infrastructure problem SUPPORT Customer Support Product or service not working SECURITY Network Security Security bulletins or queries Expires November 1996 [Page 3]
INTERNET-DRAFT STD ADDR May 1996 3.3. Optional, Less Well Known Addresses Address Purpose -------------------------------------------------------------- NIC DNS service (usually a synonym for HOSTMASTER) WWW HTTP service (usually a synonym for WEBMASTER) NEWS NNTP service (usually a synonym for USENET) FTP-ADMIN FTP service (usually a synonym for FTP) LISTOWNER Mailing list administration (prefer *-REQUEST) TROUBLE Network operations (usually a synonym for NOC) ROUTING Network operations (usually a synonym for NOC) HELP Customer service (usually a synonym for SUPPORT) ROOT Customer service (usually a synonym for SUPPORT) 4 - Other Well Known Addresses 4.1. Many mailing lists have an administrative address to which add/drop requests and other metaqueries can be sent. For a mailing list whose submission address is <LIST@DOMAIN>, the usual administrative address is <LIST-REQUEST@DOMAIN>. With the advent of list management software such as MajorDomo, this convention is becoming less common and its absence for any given mailing list should be treated as a standards violation. Make sure that your lists each have a *-REQUEST address and complain to remote POSTMASTERs when you discover remote lists without *-REQUEST addresses. 4.2. Several Internet registries implement mailing lists for Autonomous System contacts. So, for example, mail sent to <AS3557@RA.NET> will at the time of this writing reach the technical contact for Autonomous System 3557 in the BGP4 (see [RFC1654], [RFC1655] and [RFC1656]). Not all Autonomous Systems are registered with all registries, however, and so undeliverable addresses under this scheme should be treated as an inconvenience rather than as an error or a standards violation. 4.3. In DNS (see [RFC1033], [RFC1034] and [RFC1035]), the Start Of Authority record (SOA RR) has a field for specifying the mail address of the zone's administrator. This field should be a simple word without metacharacters (such as ``%'' or ``!'' or ``::''), and a transport level alias should be used on the relevant mail exchanger hosts to direct zone administration mail to the appropriate mailbox. For simplicity and regularity, it is hereby recommended that the well known address HOSTMASTER always be used. Expires November 1996 [Page 4]
INTERNET-DRAFT STD ADDR May 1996 5 - Security Considerations Denial of service attacks (flooding a mailbox with junk) will be easier after this document becomes a standard. 6 - References [RFC821] J. Postel, "Simple Mail Transfer Protocol", RFC 821, Information Sciences Institute, 08/01/1982 [RFC822] D. Crocker, "Standard for the format of ARPA Internet text messages", RFC 822, University of Delaware, 08/13/1982. [RFC959] J. Postel (et al), "File Transfer Protocol (FTP)", RFC 959, Information Sciences Institute, October 1985. [RFC974] C. Partridge, "Mail routing and the domain system", RFC 974, CSNET CIC BBN Laboratories Inc, 01/01/1986. [RFC976] M. Horton, "UUCP mail interchange format standard", RFC 976, Bell Laboratories, 02/01/1986. [RFC977] B. Kantor (et al), "Network News Transfer Protocol: A Proposed Standard for the Stream-Based Transmission of News", RFC 977, University of California, February 1986. [RFC1033] M. Lottor, "Domain administrators operations guide", RFC 1033, SRI International, 11/01/1987. [RFC1034] P. Mockapetris, "Domain names - concepts and facilities", RFC 1035, USC/Information Sciences Institute, 11/01/1987. [RFC1035] P. Mockapetris, ``Domain Names - Implementation and Specification,'' RFC 1035, USC/Information Sciences Institute, November 1987. Expires November 1996 [Page 5]
INTERNET-DRAFT STD ADDR May 1996 [RFC1654] Y. Rekhter (et al), "A Border Gateway Protocol 4 (BGP-4)", RFC 1654, T.J. Watson Research Center, IBM Corp., 07/21/1994. [RFC1655] Y. Rekhter (et al), "Application of the Border Gateway Protocol in the Internet", RFC 1655, T.J. Watson Research Center, IBM Corp., 07/21/1994. [RFC1656] P. Traina, "BGP-4 Protocol Document Roadmap and Implementation Experience", RFC 1656, cisco Systems, July 1994. [HTTP] T. Berners-Lee (et al), "Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.0", <draft-ietf-http-v10-spec-05.txt>, February 19, 1996. 7 - Acknowledgements Thanks to Stan Barber, Michael Dillon, James Aldridge, J. D. Falk, Peter Kaminski, and Brett Watson for their comments on this document. 8 - Author's Address Paul Vixie Internet Software Consortium Star Route Box 159A Woodside, CA 94062 +1 415 747 0204 <paul@vix.com> $Id: stdaddr.txt,v 1.4 1996/05/03 18:15:41 vixie Exp vixie $ Expires November 1996 [Page 6]