[anti-abuse-wg] Decision on Proposal 2017-02 & Next Steps

Dear Anonymous "Name",

> How do you check the email address is valid if you don't email it?
> 
> https://www.ripe.net/participate/policies/proposals/2017-02

I think the NCC will be able to tell more details when the plans are ready.

For now, the relevant part is probably:

> The RIPE NCC will validate the technical parameters of an “abuse-mailbox:” attribute, such as syntax, domain and mail server configuration, to determine if it is correctly configured to receive messages.

One can determine with a high degree of confidence whether mail sent to a
given address is accepted for delivery by the mail server specified as MX
in the DNS for the given e-mail address. To me it is a good start and
much more than not checking anything.

One can probably not test whether the accepted mail is indeed delivered
and even less whether is is eventually read by a human. The latter cannot
be checked even if one does send the e-mail and even get a reply (generally
speaking one cannot be certain the response was sent by a human).

Therefore, I would leave the details to the NCC for now.

Best regards,
Janos