--On Friday, June 11, 2021 14:51 -0500 Spencer Dawkins at IETF
<spencerdawkins.ietf@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Following up on one point ...
>
> On Fri, Jun 11, 2021 at 12:31 PM Michael Richardson
> <mcr+ietf@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>>
>> I know we have draft-xxx@xxxxxxxx aliases, and those can get
>> updated via the
>> DT, I'm unclear if I can email rfcxxxx@xxxxxxxx to reach the
>> authors, and that's not what's listed in the RFC.
>>
>
> I just made sure - I sent to the address that would be my most
> recent RFC, and got back "550 5.1.1 <rfc8462@xxxxxxxx>:
> Recipient address rejected: User unknown in virtual alias
> table".
>
> So, that's a "nope".
>
> The minor question is that I'd expect such addresses to be
> RFC793@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx(*) addresses, but let's ignore that for
> now.
>
> We might be able to pull this off, going forward, but we're
> doing AUTH48 on drafts in the 9040 range now. I'd bet that
> there are a *lot *of past authors who aren't reachable at an
> email address that the RFC Editor knows about for a variety of
> reasons
>
> So it would be good to figure out what the objective would be
> - to find someone who might still be knowledgeable about the
> topic of the RFC, or still caring about the topic of the RFC,
> or still reading e-mail, or what, exactly?
>
> One objective might be to find someone who "is responsible
> for" the RFC - I was chasing down who was responsible for the
> work produced by a concluded WG, literally "yesterday", so
> that objective seems worthy, but I'm sure there are others.
>
> Best,
>
> Spencer
>
> (*) Yes, I chose one of Jon Postel's RFCs on purpose ... p "
For whatever it is worth and IIR, the RFC Editor made an effort
to keep an up-to-date list of contact addresses for RFC authors
25 or 30 years ago. It was a complete failure, at least in the
sense that it became clear that it would have required a large
amount of ongoing outreach and tracking-down effort on the RFC
Editor's part to even have hope of keeping things up to date.
And that was when we were published far fewer RFCs -- for
example, only around 135 in CY 1995; harder to guess for recent
years because of the number of documents being published out of
chronological order, but I'd guess much larger. And, again
subjectively the number of authors of whom one would need to
keep track has also grown significantly. I assume John Levine
has much more exact figures if anyone cared, but I really
suspect this is a dead end without a commitment of significantly
more energy and resources than it is worth.
john
