1. Summary and recommendations

This document makes the following recommendations for organizations on the Internet:

     (1)   An organization SHOULD publish public E-mail addresses and
           other public address information about Internet users
           within their site.

     (2)   Most countries have laws concerning publication of
           information about persons. Above and beyond these, the
           organization SHOULD follow the recommendations of [1].

     (3)   The currently preferable way for publishing the information
           is by using X.500 as its data structure and naming scheme
           (defined in [4] and discussed in [3], but some countries
           use a refinement nationally, like [15] for the US). The
           organization MAY additionally publish it using additional
           data structures such as whois++.

     (4)   The organization SHOULD make the published information
           available to LDAP clients, by allowing LDAP servers access
           to their data".

     (5)   The organization SHOULD NOT attempt to charge for simple
           access to the data.

In addition, it makes the following recommendations for various and sundry other parties:

     (1)   E-mail vendors SHOULD include LDAP lookup functionality
           into their products, either as built-in functionality or by
           providing translation facilities.

     (2)   Internet Service providers SHOULD help smaller
           organizations follow this recommendation, either by providing
           services for hosting their data, by helping them find other
           parties to do so, or by helping them bring their own service
           on-line.

     (3)   All interested parties SHOULD make sure there exists a core
           X.500 name space in the world, and that all names in this
           name space are resolvable. (National name spaces may
           elobarate on the core name space).

The rest of this document is justification and details for this recommendation.

The words "SHOULD", "MUST" and "MAY", when written in UPPER CASE, have the meaning defined in RFC 2119 [17]