ietf-openpgp
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Re: Recent Spam

2000-01-05 06:40:05
    "William H. Geiger III" <whgiii(_at_)openpgp(_dot_)net> said:

    All in all "spam" is a non-issue and there are really better things in
    life to worry about than a few unwanted messages.

The problem is it's not a few unwanted messages.  In the context of this
elist, maybe it's only "a few".  But I subscribe to many elists and it's
never just a few.  Besides, it's already been shown this elist has
gotten more than few.

It is possible to deal with spam at choke points, for example where the
elist is expanded.  I know because I'm a service provider and I do it
for a living.  However, I also know it's not as easy as any of the
suggestions offered here.

All the elist management applications I know have very limited
capabilities for dealing with spam.  Worse, if you're a site like
IMC.ORG that manages many elists, the applications are even less
effective at providing per elist "knobs".

In my experience the single best thing you can do to prevent spam is
restrict submissions to be from subscribers only.  But to do this you
need to moderate the submissions that bounce.  Few people have time for
this, and as Paul Hoffman pointed out, it is required for IETF elists.

It is possible to write/programs to manage the moderation, but let me
just say that I've thousands of lines of perl code to do this, and a
specialized channel for my mail system.  And I still have to do 5-15% by
hand, mostly because false positives are unacceptable.

My point is the problem is endemic to email, not any particular elist.
It's always possible to solve the problem with a reasonable set of
resources for one elist.  It's very hard to do in general.  Paul, the
manager of this elist, has the general problem.

Jim
--
James M. Galvin                                  <galvin(_at_)acm(_dot_)org>

To the optimist, the glass is half full.  To the pessimist, the glass is
half empty.  To the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

--- Begin Message ---
In <200001041655(_dot_)LAA11171(_at_)hpdmraaa(_dot_)compuserve(_dot_)com>, on 
01/04/00 
   at 01:11 PM, redtenbacher(_at_)csi(_dot_)com said:

I am aware that during recent discussion of previous spam on this list
some members have suggested that every member increase their individual
"kill files". However, I cannot consider this to be an acceptable
solution as it violates one of the design principles of the Internet: "If
you can do something in one place, don't multiply the effort to many
places."

Moreover, in Europe many people pay for connection time.
Therefore downloading spam (and thus paying for it) and then delete it
(automatically or after inspection) is not a very efficient
solution.

This is an *open* list. That means anyone can post here not just
subscribers. We even had David "FUD" Sternlight posting here a while back.
The amount a "spam" is quite lite <10 messages a month. DL times and the
amount of time/effort to hit the delete key is quite insignificant. Not to
mention the amount of time & bandwidth wasted on complaining about "spam"
generally exceeds that of the "spam" being complained about. So called
"solutions" to "spam" generally lead to a more restrictive environment for
all those involved and range from a minor inconvenience for the list
subscribers to the truly draconian.

All in all "spam" is a non-issue and there are really better things in
life to worry about than a few unwanted messages.



-- 
---------------------------------------------------------------
William H. Geiger III                    http://www.openpgp.net  
Geiger Consulting    

Data Security & Cryptology Consulting
Programming, Networking, Analysis
 
PGP for OS/2:                   http://www.openpgp.net/pgp.html
---------------------------------------------------------------


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