ietf-dkim
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Re: [ietf-dkim] Mailing list reality check

2010-09-20 09:37:19
1.  The overall amount of mail sent through discussion lists is small
relative to direct (person-to-person) mail or to broadcast (one-to-many)
mail.

That depends on the person.  In any event, how is the proportion of 
personal-to-group mail relevant to any topic of the working group?

There's tradeoffs among optimizations for various scenarios, so I'd like 
to optimize for the ones that are most common.

2.  Lists do a good enough job of managing the mail that they forward that
recipients generally do not worry about spam filtering mail from lists to
which they've subscribed.  (Bozo filtering of legit but stupid messages
doesn't count as spam filtering.)

"do not worry...they've subscribed"
->
"have not produced a broad requirement for enhanced list performance of spam 
filtering."

Sorry, I don't understand what that phrase is supposed to mean.  Enhanced 
how?  And like I said, I'm trying to describe what lists do now, not what 
they might hypothetically do at some future time.

3.  The most common way for spam to get into a list in recent years is for
a subscriber's account to be stolen by a spammer who sends spam to
addresses in the account's address book.

I've no idea what the substantiation for this assertion.  It well might be 
true, but I'm not seeing how it is relevant to any topic of the working 
group.

I'm describing what I've seen on the lists I manage and the lists I 
subscribe to.  It may not be statistically significant, but it's what I've 
got.  There's vast amounts of spam from random sending addresses, but the 
list software automatically rejects it all.

If spam comes from subscribers rather than from bad guys trying to 
impersonate them, there's no benefit from extra mechanism to keep out the 
nonexistent impersonators.

(There is also likely to be a huge difference between lists that 
restrict posting rights and those that don't.)

Well, there's another reality check:

4.  Most (nearly all?) lists restrict posting to addresses known to the 
list software, such as list subscribers.  Mail from other addresses is 
typically either rejected or sent for manual handling by the list manager.

R's,
John
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