[LINK] Recommended email addresses...?

[Ivan Trundle]

On 15/05/2007, at 9:18 AM, Stilgherrian wrote:

> Gentle Linkers,
>
> To qualify as a "good citizen of the Internet", which email  
> addresses should
> organizations monitor and respond to?

This presupposes that all domains are organisations that care  
(ignoring personal domains). There are enough domains in use that  
don't care about being good citizens that this topic might be  
irrelevant. I'm still waiting for a number of key Australian  
government departments to configure their mail servers properly, let  
alone attend to their websites. IF these things could be mandated,  
we'd all be happy - except that there is no compulsion for anyone to  
actually ANSWER mail sent to postmaster at ... or abuse at ... etc.

> Obviously there's the ones mentioned in RFC 2142 like postmaster@ and
> hostmaster@ and abuse@ ... http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2142.txt ...  
> but what
> about others that are just "assumed" to be in use. webmaster@ comes  
> to mind,
> if I want to tell someone about a problem with their website... are  
> there
> others?

help at ... or info at ... seem to be fairly common in business, from my  
experience. Also, some smaller organisations with short acronyms  
often use their acronym as the prefix: abc at abc.com.au (not a true  
example).

> Are some of those RFC-listed addresses now considered to be  
> "quaint" and can
> be safely ignored in practice?
>
> This is in the context of BUSINESS, not "personal domains" --  
> though I'm
> tempted to say that if someone maintains an Internet presence under a
> specific domain name then there should probably be some generally- 
> assumed
> way of contacting that person "via the Internet", which in practice  
> means
> via email, and that we can assume that the message will be  
> received. Or does
> the Internet not qualify as "real" communication in this regard?

An interesting point: I've seen enough websites (business,  
especially) that deliberately hide e-mail addresses, or don't offer a  
suitable range of methods of contact. Some don't like to list the  
physical location, some don't like to list e-mail addresses, some  
don't like to list phone numbers. Some offer web-based forms so that  
contact can be made, but so that information about the actual e-mail  
address sent to is hidden. And so that recording any contact is in  
the hands of the recipient, not the sender.

I come across this problem frequently enough that it is maddening.  
It's as if a business refuses to make it easy to communicate in any  
form other than the one prescribed on a website. Very frustrating  
too, if you want to actually TALK to someone. I had to resort to  
looking up an ABN for a Canberra-based business to find their contact  
details (a computer supplier that sells on the net, and no - I'm not  
inclined to buy from them because of this).

> This is also in the context of the REALITY of the Internet today,  
> not the
> idealism of the Internet from 20 years ago back when everyone was  
> an anally
> retentive systems administrator... ;)

Those were the days. Retentive sys admins were gods. How they have  
fallen.