Re: More member-only anti-spam

["Donald E. Eastlake 3rd" <dee3@torque.pothole.com>]

Hi,

From:  Lloyd Wood <l.wood@eim.surrey.ac.uk>
Date:  Tue, 13 Feb 2001 12:44:56 +0000 (GMT)
X-Sender:  eep1lw@regan.ee.surrey.ac.uk
To:  udlr@sophia.inria.fr
cc:  ietf@ietf.org, poised@lists.tislabs.com
In-Reply-To:  <3A88F8BA.14289ADE@UDcast.com>
Message-ID:  <Pine.GSO.4.21.0102131215280.28596-100000@regan.ee.surrey.ac.uk>
Organization:  speaking for none
X-url:  http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/

>On Tue, 13 Feb 2001, Emmanuel Duros wrote on udlr:
>
>> I am forwarding this mails to the udlr mailing list.
>> There has been for several months an anti-spam mechanism at INRIA. It
>> basicaly prevents unsubscribed people from sending mails to the mailing
>> list. Unfortunately, iesg-secretary@ietf.org is one of them...
>[..]
>
>quite important forwarded mail of 10 Feb, indicating udlr draft moving
>to proposed standard, snipped.
>
>You just can't do members-only on IETF WG lists. See recent discussion
>on poisson. I'd suggest moving the list elsewhere...

The IETF and IETF WGs don't have "members".  Presumably you mean
subscribers.

While the circumstances of each working group differ and it should be
up the the WG consensus, chair, and Area Director, many if not most
IETF WG's have some sort of non-subscriber/spam filtration.  You do,
of course, need to be sure that there is reasonable allowance for
important messages from non-subscribers.  For example, keeping a list
of from addresses whose posts go through automatically even though
they are not subscribed and sending all blocked mail to someone who
will promptly forward them to the list if appropriate.

I believe that all of the WG mailing lists I subscribe to have some
such mechanism and one such list, that has special problems with
inappropriate posts, has every message manually approved before it
goes to the list.

>Antispam measures interfere with the normal business of the IETF, to
>its detriment.

Antispam measures greatly enchance the normal business of the IETF by
keeping people involved in WG mailing lists when they would otherwise
be driven away be junk and decreasing the waste of their time and
other resources.

>L.
><L.Wood@surrey.ac.uk>PGP<http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/>

The appropriate place for this perennial topic, which after a lot of
fooferaw, always ends up deciding that, while IETF mailing lists
should be as open as practical, it is reasonable for them to have
various levels of filtration depending on the circumstances, is the
poised@lists.tislabs.com mailing list so I have added a reply-to
header pointed there.

Thanks,
Donald
===================================================================
 Donald E. Eastlake 3rd                    dee3@torque.pothole.com
 155 Beaver Streeet                         lde008@dma.isg.mot.com
 Milford, MA 01757 USA     +1 508-634-2066(h)   +1 508-261-5434(w)