[ppml] Policy Proposal 2003-1: Human Point of Contact

[Lee Howard]

Speaking as the Admin contact for UUNET, I can say that in the seven 
months I have been listed publically I have received thousands of spam
messages (about 100-150 per day), a dozen threats, and maybe a couple
hundred (about 10/week) spam or hacker/abuse/security reports.  I reply
politely to every one of the latter, explaining what information should
be provided to whom (abuse-mail at wcom.com).  Most of the abuse reports
I get are sent to me instead of the Abuse POC.

I have not seen any requests that I could handle other than referring
to the existing POCs.

I also read NANOG, where I often see requests for help of some kind
from someone at UUNET, and I almost always direct those requests to the
right place, or have someone call the queriant.  Many other UUNET people
do the same.  None of these requests has ever been sent to the Admin POC 
of UUNET directly.

If the entire Internet user community could be trained to not spam the
Human POC, and to exhaust other POCs before trying the Human POC, I'd
support this proposal.  The proposal is based on an assumption that
personal email addresses are more likely to elicit responses than role
accounts. 

Lee



On Tue, 4 Mar 2003, Richard A Steenbergen wrote:

> Date: Tue, 04 Mar 2003 21:34:05 -0500
> From: Richard A Steenbergen <ras at e-gerbil.net>
> To: ppml at arin.net
> Subject: Re: [ppml] Policy Proposal 2003-1: Human Point of Contact
> 
> On Tue, Mar 04, 2003 at 11:36:19AM -0500, Member Services wrote:
> > Problems:
> >         I understand the issue of hate mail, threats, and the general
> >         difficulty of dealing with irate complainers.  However, in
> >         any business, there are risks.  Being the human lightning rod
> >         for these complaints at a large provider is not a lot of fun,
> >         but it is a job which must be done.  Nobody likes to clean
> >         the restroom.
> 
> That sounds like a volunteer to me... You're available 24/7 right?
> 
> Let's get real here, that policy isn't just bad it's absurd. Role accounts
> exist for a reason, and 99% of the time it is to improve communications.
> I'd suggest that trying to solve the 1% of the cases where people are
> hiding behind roles by breaking the other 99% is not the way to go.
> 
> I'd also suggest that it is a fallacy to project what you consider
> "reasonable" in your business onto others. For example, who is the 1
> person that you would recommend to handle all of UUNet's issues?
> 
>