So, here are the choices:
1. Save thousands of people from having to deal with multiple spams per day,
at the cost of presenting a minor inconvenience to a few, or
2. Require thousands of people to receive and deal with spam (or to learn
all about mail filtering), in order to avoid inconveniencing a few.
you have it backwards. all subscribers of the list are 'inconvenienced'
if we discourage legitimate contributions from folks who are not willing
to jump through arbitrary and time-consuming hoops that we impose on them
just because a few people insisted (even in the face of evidence to the
contrary) that they knew what was best for everyone else.
This assumes that list filtering cannot be done sensibly. This assumption is
false; it can be done sensibly and is done sensibly all the time. And when it
is done sensibly the amount of inconvenience is unnoticeable. Sure, there are
plenty of lists that don't do filtering sensibly (including, alas, some IETF WG
lists), but there are many others that do.
Whether or not list filtering can be sensibly applied to a list with the
characteristics of the main IETF list is just a matter of resources. The
necessary technologies exist to cope with all the trickiness the IETF list
presents and more. All we have to do is agree to apply them and find the
resources to make it happen.
calling those hoops a 'minor inconvenience' is also misleading.
Only if the lists aren't managed correctly.
Keith, I have to say that you are becoming your own worst enemy in this
discussion. By insisting on an absolute policy of no filtering at all your
ability to influence the policy that eventually is adopted is being
compromised. As a result we are increasingly likely to end up with a list
policy imposed that doesn't accomodate some aspect of real world behavior that
could have been dealt with.
I also find the comparisons with NAT to be strained at best.
Ned