OK, I'm convinced about not keeping the spam. I still think the "kooks"
list has two values: 1) people who think they are being unfairly
discriminated against have a simple database to point to for evidence; 2)
who know what people 50 years from now will find interesting....which goes
to the related question of keeping the whole archive available somewhere
when the working group finishes.
(There's of course a theoretical issue with some hypothetical listowner
treating criticism as spam, but sufficent until the day...)
On Mon, 2 Dec 2002, Fred Baker wrote:
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.
--
Please visit http://www.icannwatch.org
A. Michael Froomkin | Professor of Law | froomkin(_at_)law(_dot_)tm
U. Miami School of Law, P.O. Box 248087, Coral Gables, FL 33124 USA
+1 (305) 284-4285 | +1 (305) 284-6506 (fax) | http://www.law.tm
-->It's warm here.<--