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

[John Levine <[e-mail]>]

It appears that John C Klensin  <[e-mail]> said:
>For whatever it is worth and IIR, 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, at least in the
>sense that it became clear that it would have required a large
>amount of ongoing outreach and tracking-down effort on the RFC
>Editor's part to even have hope of keeping things up to date.
>And that was when we were published far fewer RFCs -- for
>example, only around 135 in CY 1995; harder to guess for recent
>years because of the number of documents being published out of
>chronological order, but I'd guess much larger.  And, again
>subjectively the number of authors of whom one would need to
>keep track has also grown significantly.   I assume John Levine
>has much more exact figures if anyone cared, but I really
>suspect this is a dead end without a commitment of significantly
>more energy and resources than it is worth.

Since we switched to XML in Oct 2019, there have been 687 unique
author addresses. Below is the unsurprising list of all of the domains
with more than two addresses.

We've managed for 50 years without a system to track contact info and at this
point it would be a frustrating full time job to try and do so.  We are already
seeing a lot of authors using gmail for stable addresses and I don't see any
reaspon to try to duplicate that.

R's,
John

('gmail.com', 100)
('cisco.com', 65)
('huawei.com', 24)
('juniper.net', 20)
('google.com', 20)
('ericsson.com', 18)
('nokia.com', 9)
('verisign.com', 8)
('orange.com', 7)
('isc.org', 6)
('att.com', 6)
('apple.com', 5)
('intel.com', 5)
('chinamobile.com', 5)
('ieee.org', 4)
('interdigital.com', 4)
('microsoft.com', 4)
('telekom.de', 4)
('chinatelecom.cn', 4)
('zte.com.cn', 4)
('telefonica.com', 4)
('icann.org', 3)
('ifi.uio.no', 3)
('sinodun.com', 3)
('fb.com', 3)
('bupt.edu.cn', 3)
('cloudflare.com', 3)
('yahoo.com', 3)
('telecom-paris.fr', 3)
('alibaba-inc.com', 3)
('arm.com', 3)
('amazon.com', 3)
('vocal.com', 3)
('nist.gov', 3)
('fh-muenster.de', 3)
('nlnetlabs.nl', 3)
('inria.fr', 3)
('futurewei.com', 3)