ietf
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: namedroppers mismanagement, continued

2002-11-26 08:03:32
Why not simply subscribe and resend?

As a maintainer of several lists, I can confirm what a royal pain it is to
deal with people posting from non-subscribed addresses.  I usually get 1-2 a
week as I'm sorting through the 10-15 SPAMs a day.  I'm sure I mistakenly
reject many of them.

Just my $.02 worth,


-Dave

On Tuesday, 26 Nov 2002, D. J. Bernstein wrote:
I've sent twelve messages to the namedroppers mailing list this month.
Five of them have been silently discarded by the namedroppers censor,
Randy Bush. (See http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/namedroppers.html for previous
incidents.)

Bush says that the only relevant feature of my messages is that they're
sent from an address that isn't subscribed to namedroppers. Okay, boys
and girls, let's look at some statistics:

   * 5/12 of my messages have been silently discarded;

   * according to Bush, this has nothing to do with me or the content,
     so we estimate that about 5/12 of all non-subscriber messages have
     been silently discarded;

   * in the past three months, there have been about 100 legitimate
     messages from other people who Bush labelled as non-subscribers;

   * so we estimate that, in the last three months, Bush has silently
     discarded about 71 legitimate messages from other people. That's a
     rate of hundreds per year.

Bush doesn't say ``Your message didn't go through.'' Bush doesn't say
``Reply to this bounce to confirm your original message.'' He simply
throws the message away.

This is supposed to be the mailing list for an open IETF working group.
It's outrageous that valid messages are being silently discarded---even
if the number is not as large as hundreds per year.

---D. J. Bernstein, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics,
Statistics, and Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago

P.S. Out of my twelve messages, the five that were silently discarded
are exactly the five that I would pick if I were a censor trying to bias
the DNSEXT decisions in favor of the BIND company. Coincidence, right?

P.P.S. Bush's mailing-list software doesn't cryptographically confirm
unsubscription requests. I kept my subscription address private until
Bush revealed it a few days ago. I'm working on obtaining a subscription
through an address that Bush doesn't know is connected to me.


-- 
David Frascone

                   My karma ran over my dogma