At 11:50 AM 11/27/2002 -0500, Michael Froomkin - U.Miami School of Law wrote:
Regardless of the specifics of this case, I think a good rule would be to
say that all bounced messages on any IETF list MUST be archived on a
separate 'bounced' list.
Sounds good on the surface, but you might want to reconsider operationally.
We drop probably 30-40 messages a day from the IAB list, mostly KLEZ
Viruses, 419 scams, spam in oriental characters, and random other sales
stuff. This is after having moved it from iab(_at_)isi(_dot_)edu to iab(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org;
you'd be amazed how much crud goes to the former list.
Since it is a members-only list, we *do* use a "recognized persons" list to
reduce the filtering load; this has allowed a few virus-mails through, but
not much. In acting as one of the four moderators for six months, I have
"approved" perhaps a dozen messages total, and in each case added the
sender to the "recognized sender" list so I don't have to mess with it. The
recognized senders, btw, include all IESG members and all working group
chairs as of a certain date, and we add other folks as needed. The
kooks-and-nonsense notes I have silently discarded have been less than I
allowed through, perhaps three or four at most.
I think it is positively dangerous to archive Klez emails, and a waste of
online storage. A person reviewing the email might open the application.
I could see archiving the kooks-and-nonsense email. It wouldn't be a very
interesting archive - you have to *earn* a place on that list, and as a
result I'll bet that most folks on this list have that list built into
their individual email filters already. But I really don't see the value of
archiving the spam.