[ARIN-consult] Oppose retiring email templates

[michael.dillon at bt.com]

> Holy acronyms batman!
> 
> Can someone please explain to me why complicating a process 
> that's already very simple and easy to work with is a good thing?

While simplicity is a good way to provide a transaction service
for the bulk of the users, it cannot untangle the existing complexity
in a small number of the larger ISPs. If it is necessary to have 
some alphabet soup to help those few organizations, who have a 
large number of transactions, then it is reasonable for ARIN
to prepare a bit of alphabet soup.

In any case, even simple things like the RFC822 object model
and SMTP, can get stale with age. In this case it forces
ARIN to do all of this processing on their email servers,
and even worse, it uses the same email address as is used
to contact their hostmasters.

It makes an awful lot of sense to do the automated transactions
on a server that has nothing to do with email, and use a unique
email address (and probably subdomain) to get the transactions
to that server. Once you have done that, the RFC822 templates
and SMTP seem like a lot of overkill.

On a completely different level, there is a problem with getting
technically skilled people to work on the SWIP transaction service.
Hundreds of thousands of people have experience with RESTful web
services. But very few people have experience with building and
maintaining SMTP transaction systems and most of those people are
not in the USA and are employed by spammers, phishers and other
criminal groups. ARIN should not be dependent on any technology
that is too far from the mainstream and when the mainstream moves
in a new direction, ARIN should move too.

--Michael Dillon