Incidentally, neither I nor any of my colleagues at L-Soft were aware of
this RFC. Even though our product is specifically mentioned, it looks
like none of the members of the working group who drafted it had the
professional courtesy to inform us or send us a copy. I am confident that
the party line will be that we only have ourselves to blame as the
working group was clearly announced on some IETF mailing list we don't
have the time to read because every other message is "unsubscribe" or
then a keynote address about top-level domains, and we could not
reasonably expect the working group to want to involve key players in the
industry that they were about to legislate on, but the real problem is
that your average reader will of course assume that we were involved in
drafting the document and that we endorse it. In fact we had no knowledge
of its existence, and we don't endorse it at all because the wording is
confusing and the interpretation I am reading (that the -REQUEST address
is the correct and official place to send list manager commands) is
totally unacceptable to us, as it leaves no contact point for the HUMAN
list owner, a very serious shortcoming for today's non-technical users.
Quite frankly I am amazed that the working group thought they could just
come up with this decision and that we would do whatever they said, on
account of the IETF stamp and in spite of the (probable) lack of mailing
list expertise in the working group. I know this was the prevalent
attitude 10 years ago, but you'd think things would have changed now that
even the IETF admits that the industry controls the standards in practice
and that IETF standards are worthless unless the industry agrees to
implement them. Anyway, L-Soft will continue to use -REQUEST for the
human contact + autoresponder, and -SERVER for the command address.
Eric
