Best practices for sending network maintenance notifications

[Dan Mahoney, System Admin]

All,

We recently, at $dayjob, had one of our peers (at Symantec)  send out a 
network maint notification, putting 70 addresses in the "To:" field, 
rather than using BCC or the exchange's mailing list.

Naturally, when you mail 30 addresses, of the forms peering@ and noc@ 
various organizations, you're likely to hit at least a few 
autoresponders and ticket systems...

And at least one or two of those autoresponders are of course brainded and 
configured to reply-all.  (In this case, Verizon's ServiceNow setup was 
such a stupid responder).  And that made things fun in our own ticket 
system, as our RT setup happily created a bunch of tickets.

My question for the group -- does anyone know if there's a "best 
practices" for sending maint notifications like this?  An RFC sort of 
thing?

While it would define a social protocol, rather than a truly technical 
one, if there's not such a document, it seems like it could useful.  And 
once such a thing exists, exchanges could of course helpfully point their 
members AT it (for both their humans, and ticket systems, to follow).

-Dan

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