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RE: filtering of mailing lists and NATs

2001-05-22 11:10:03
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.

There is a fine line between "anti-spam" and "censorship." I would much
rather receive and delete another annoying proposition to get rich quick
or see lurid pictures than tolerate any form of censorship. This
translates into an engineering requirement. Anti-spam filters, like all
filters generate false positive, i.e. declare as spam something that is
in fact legitimate, and false negative, i.e. declare as legitimate a
message that in fact is spam. The openness requirement of the IETF
translates in a requirement to eliminate "false negative." This is the
IETF, we ought to be able to engineer that.

-- Christian Huitema