Changes to the ripe-dbm and auto-dbm acknowledgments

After 24 March, acknowledgments will be sent to all incoming mails sent to  ripe-dbm@ripe.net. This feature was requested by the RIPE community during a recent RIPE Meeting.

Addition of this new feature has required changes to the way how acknowledgments are sent from auto-dbm@ripe.net. We realise 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@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:
http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3834.txt

The widely recognised 'Precedence: bulk' mail header is used as well.

There are two types of acknowledgments - ACK and NOTIFY, that are sent by auto-dbm@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 authorisation check.

Please consult the RIPE Database Reference Manual for further details. You can find this in the RIPE Database Document Library.

For the mail of ACK type:

• The 'Reply-To:' field will be set to the auto-dbm@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@ripe.net.
• 'Auto-Submitted' field will be set to the 'auto-generated' value.