[ARIN-consult] Support for keeping text templates

[Aaron Hughes]

All,

I am writing to express support for keeping text templates.

Justification:

Over the years I have written several assignment applications for various companies that manage SWIP data for customers. Those systems, along with many others I have seen, populate e-mail based simple re-assign text templates utilizing some database (such as SalesForce contact info) to populate them. They are then forwarded to hostmaster at arin.net with appropriate spoofed from addresses.

Breaking this kind of automation would have impact to many companies, several of which may not understand they would be impacted by removing support for text based templates. 

Secondly, as far as I am aware, there are no SWIP API interfaces available today. Removing text based templates without providing another form of interaction with the SWIP database would completely stop automation of SWIP updates. This does not, however, address the issues of companies who do not know they are dependent on text based templates. 

Keeping SWIP data accurate is important to the community, ARIN members, and many government agencies. I fully believe removing support for text templates would make SWIP data more stale and less accurate than it already is.

I urge the community to support keeping text based templates functioning.

If, for some reason, this is a strain on ARIN resources, I would suggest a carefully planned parsing of the mail logs to assess the number of affected companies and reaching out to them to assess the impact.

-- 

Aaron Hughes 
aaronh at bind.com
+1-831-824-4161
Key fingerprint = AD 67 37 60 7D 73 C5 B7 33 18 3F 36 C3 1C C6 B8
http://www.bind.com/