[dns-operations] email address in SOA

[Joe Abley]

On 2012-12-05, at 20:24, Feng He <fenghe at nsbeta.info> wrote:

> for the soa record, i.e,
> google.com.             43199   IN      SOA     ns1.google.com. dns-admin.google.com. 2012113000 7200 1800 1209600 300
> 
> Though I know dns-admin.google.com is an email address standing for dns-admin at google.com
> 
> I have the questions that:
> 
> #1 what purpose is this address used for?

It's used for

(a) legitimate operational communication with a zone maintainer, and

(b) source data for people harvesting addresses in order to send spam.

Since the e-mail resulting from (b) greatly outnumbers the e-mail resulting from (a), it's a reasonable assumption on the part of an (a) sender that in most cases the address won't be useful. Correspondingly, it's a reasonable assumption on the part of most zone maintainers that the address doesn't matter, unless you're in the business of collecting spam (or have a really effective way to sift through the spam to find the legitimate mail).

But perhaps I'm being over-cynical.


Joe