ietf-asrg
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: [Asrg] 6. URL "scheme" for whitelisting

2003-03-26 09:41:29
At 12:06 AM -0800 3/26/03, william(_at_)elan(_dot_)net wrote:
Standard way to report things is good. URLs are good, but they are added
for specific protocols, so do you have a new protocol in mind for
whitelisting?

Not for implementing whitelisting. And not a protocol per-se (leastwise I don't tend to think of mailto: as a protocol--it's more like a single-call API with an optional set of arguments). (Then again, I've already been chastised once off-list for my loose use of the word "protocol" :-).

It seems to me that whitelists have two major drawbacks.

1. User doesn't whitelist in advance, or know what *to* whitelist in advance.
2. Spammers can take advantage of them.

I have no intention of trying to solve #2. But there seem to be a be a lot different solutions out there that depend on whitelisting. I think that they would benefit from a mechanism whereby a list-maintainer could provide a simple clickable URL that would provide the necessary whitelist information to the whitelisting software. E.g. "whitelist:list(_at_)example(_dot_)com". Presumably a set of optional arguments would be specified that would allow use by more sophisticated whitelisting systems. "whitelist:list(_at_)example(_dot_)com?pgpkey=xxxx&iprange=yyy-xxx".

I don't think I'm the right person to do this. To me whitelisting is what someone does when our software has a bug :-). But if nobody else is willing to pick it up then I guess I can try see if I can't come up with a list of information used by current whitelisting systems.

Again (since I've received a couple messages about this offlist), I have no interest in discussing pros and cons of different whitelisting systems. I just want to make life easier for someone who maintains a mailing list and is getting sick of the growing number of subscriber bounces.
--
Kee Hinckley
http://www.puremessaging.com/        Junk-Free Email Filtering
http://commons.somewhere.com/buzz/   Writings on Technology and Society

I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.
_______________________________________________
Asrg mailing list
Asrg(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg