Discuss mailing list

[Jeff Taylor <shdwdrgn AT sourpuss.net>]

There has been some debate about whether people's email addresses should 
be publicly posted in services like a whois listing, but the 
administrators of opennic DO need a valid email address to reach people 
by.  I believe the easiest way to solve all of the suggestions is to 
simply maintain two separate email fields.  If you log in to the members 
page (https://opennicproject.org/members/) you will see that there is 
now a public and private email field listed.

Private email: This will ONLY be viewable by opennic admins and will be 
used in case we need to get ahold of you directly, or for general 
maintenance scripts like domain expirations or user account cleanup.

Public email: This field can be used by anyone creating a script to show 
user information.  For example, there is a whois service available for 
all of the domains managed by be.libre  (whois -h api.opennic.glue 
<domain.name>) which will shortly be including your public email if you 
choose to list one.  This field is completely optional!!!  If you do not 
want a public email address listed, just leave it blank.  This field can 
also be the same as your private address, or it can (and perhaps should) 
be a different address since there is a chance that it could be scraped 
by spammers.

Note that the email address you had previously entering in your user 
account will be the PRIVATE address.  You only need to make changes if 
you wish to publish a public address.  Let me know if you have any 
comments or questions.

And speaking of user accounts... there are currently 5770 user accounts 
created under opennic.  I know there are not really that many people 
here! Unfortunately there has never been any sort of cleanup action on 
the list of members.  I'm going to try and write up a script soon which 
will send an email to all existing users (using your private address).  
The email will have a web URL to click on which will validate your 
account is still active, and after a period of several weeks I will wipe 
all non-validated accounts. (I'll post a message here to let folks know 
when to expect this email.)  It's an ugly remedy, but very few people 
tell me when they want an old account deleted, so we're left with the 
current mess.