[db-wg] Complying with Mail Provider Requirements When Sending Mail from Whois

Dear colleagues,

As part of the Whois 1.111 release planned for 28th March, we will make changes to comply with new requirements for bulk email senders from two of the large email providers, namely Google [1][2] and Yahoo [3][4]. The RIPE NCC are reviewing these requirements across all our services. Please refer to the RIPE Labs article published today [5].

We send a lot of mail from Whois, on average 30,000 messages a day (comprised mostly of update acknowledgements and notifications) which qualifies us as a bulk sender. We want to comply with these requirements as we depend on email for notifications but also to listen to our users wishes. There are nearly 900,000 email addresses in the RIPE Database. 65,000 are hosted by Google and 5,000 by Yahoo, so these addresses are directly affected by these requirements. 

In this release, we will implement mail bounce detection (i.e. an outgoing message has permanently failed delivery) and also unsubscription (i.e. one-click unsubscribe from a mail client). Once an address is undeliverable or unsubscribed, we will not send further Whois update acknowledgements or notifications to that address. However we will continue to send targeted notifications where required by RIPE policy (e.g. abuse-c validation, RIPE-NONAUTH route object cleanup etc.). 

Notification attributes in the RIPE Database (i.e. irt-nfy, mnt-nfy, notify, ref-nfy, upd-to) will be affected, as we will no longer send update notifications to an unsubscribed or undeliverable address. In update acknowledgements we will warn if any address is undeliverable or unsubscribed. Once unsubscribed, if you want to re-subscribe, for now you will need to contact RIPE NCC support [6].

The changes can already be tested in our Release Candidate environment [7].

We welcome feedback from the community.

Regards
Ed Shryane
RIPE NCC

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References

1. Google announcement: https://blog.google/products/gmail/gmail-security-authentication-spam-protection/
2. Google email sender guidelines: https://support.google.com/a/answer/81126?hl=en
3. Yahoo announcement: https://blog.postmaster.yahooinc.com/post/730172167494483968/more-secure-less-spam
4. Yahoo sender best practices: https://senders.yahooinc.com/best-practices/
5. Enhancing Email Delivery at the RIPE NCC: https://labs.ripe.net/author/fergalc/enhancing-email-delivery-at-the-ripe-ncc/
6. Contacting the RIPE NCC https://www.ripe.net/support/contact/
7. Release candidate environment https://apps.db.ripe.net/docs/Release-Notes/#release-candidate-environment