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Re: Spam prevention gone too far?

2002-04-03 10:27:20

I did like the last part of this RISKS item, which said:

I would even go so far as to say that I question the
legitimacy of allowing RISKS submissions from people who make it impossible
for people to send them E-mail responses to their submissions.

A Tom Lehrer line comes to mind:

   I know there are people in this world who do not love their fellow human
   beings and I hate people like that!

I'm reminded of Gosper's line from HAKMEM about a guy with a
"read-only mind".   How else do you desribe someone who insists on sending 
mail to large groups of people without being able to accept a response? 

As for the problem of inappropriate bouncing of mail - I do think it
might be useful to write an RFC documenting dubious practices,
such as refusing mail with a null return-path, expecting the mail
to come from a client machine with the same name as the sender's 
domain, trusting blacklists, etc.  But traditionally we've said
that the folks running mail servers have the right to refuse mail for 
any reason, and I don't think that we can change that.    

As usual, we can try to provide useful advice.  Whether folks follow it 
is a different matter.

Keith

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