Re: RFC793#ietf.org (was: Re: Proposed ietf.org email address policy)

[Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]>]

On 12. Jun 2021, at 03:32, John C Klensin <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> the RFC Editor made an effort
> to keep an up-to-date list of contact addresses for RFC authors
> 25 or 30 years ago.  It was a complete failure,

A nice example for how solid experience can go stale over time.

Background: my department runs an email alias service for alumni.
When students graduate, they can establish mail forwarding to their new address on a self-service portal.
If they don’t update that forwarding address, they are nagged every year (and thus their address is checked), and if they don’t respond, the forwarding expires.
Maybe some 10 or 20 cases of manual intervention every year because forwarding addresses ceased to work or alumni forgot to extend the service in time.

I wouldn’t say that this is totally painless, but it is really low overhead.
Self-service is the ingredient that makes that possible, and opt-in turns it from an administrative nightmare (imagine the administration trying to track mail addresses for *all* alumni) to a really nice feature for those who want to benefit from it.

Of course, some code will be required in datatracker to make this kind of self-service happen, but it would be a limited, justifiable effort, with much of the components already in place.

Grüße, Carsten