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Re: Guidance for spam-control on IETF mailing lists

2002-03-15 18:40:03

On Fri, 15 Mar 2002, Joe Touch wrote:

    A nontrivial number of users utilize employer-independent email
    destinations, such as *(_at_)ieee(_dot_)org, *acm.org, etc.

    I'm not willing to write-off that as ignorance of how email works.

Sorry, you lost me here.  I thought the point was that people do have
those email addresses.  All I'm suggesting is that they should originate
their email from those addresses and believe if they know enough to have
such addresses then they know enough to do that.  How did "ignorance"
get factored in?

    These are destination-only addresses, used for forwarding. I tried this
    with Mailman (presumably a "modern" application?), to which I had
    subscribed touch(_at_)ieee(_dot_)org; it held it for approval. My options as
    moderator are: approve, reject, defer, or discard. No option for 'add to
    list of approved senders' - that requires more steps, for ME (not under
    the control of the sender). There are no options for the user to be able
    to add or control aliases.

    Or is Mailman not modern?

Mailman is modern.  Like its counterparts you can have an "authorized to
submit but do not receive" functionality.  I believe the issue you're
raising is that mailman, like its counterparts, does not have an
integrated means to manage the exception list.

That is not to say that you can not "automatically" manage the exception
list.  You just have to set it up.  LISTSERV (and my service) has a
NOMAIL feature.  I believe with all of majordomo, mailman, and Lyris you
can setup a "list" to be your exception list and then you configure the
real list to also look there when checking "permissions".  Thus you use
ordinary subscribe and unsubscribe commands to manage the exception
"list".  It's not integrated in that it requires the maintainer to set
it up, but once set up it will work.

    > In any case the penalty for getting
    > it wrong is delay, not censorship (at least in the case of the IETF
    > guidelines).

    Nope - the penalty is WORK for the moderator too.

Agreed, but the work is once per email address if you add every
exception to the "authorized" list as you discover them.  Once things
settle down there shouldn't be very much work.

Jim

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