There are several issues for the IESG:
In summary, people have brought up several reasons that this draft
shouldn't be approved. But I think these are sufficient:
1) End run around SMTP developers, as Keith Moore pointed out.
2) "spamops" past unreasonable and irrational demands and views require
careful scrutiny: Spamops needs to give consideration to lawful and
legitimate activity. People loosely associated with this group promised in
1997 to give a "technical solution" to spam. They have failed for more
than 8 years to do that, but have instead been associated with various
schemes to charge/extort fees for email services. In 1997, they rejected a
compromise with IEMCC that in retrospect was quite reasonable, and in at
least one way better than the CAN-SPAM law that was finally passed,
because IEMCC proposed to label spam with a header. In retrospect, the
spamops community has been extremely unreasonable and irrational, and has
failed to deliver anything that was promised.
3) Assertions and assumtions in the draft are based on spamops "lore"
rather than fact. This is bad engineering. The "issue" in the draft is
whether its assumptions and assertions about open relays and email
authentication are based on facts, versus the opinions of zealots.
Neither open relays nor email authentication has been shown to be related
to spam: Neither promoting spam, nor preventing spam.
4) There are also numerous detailed problems with the language in the
draft. However, in comparison with the major issues 1-3 above, these are
minor, but also indicate that the document is not suitable for last call.
More inline.
On Tue, 21 Jun 2005, Bill Sommerfeld wrote:
On Tue, 2005-06-21 at 00:28, Nicholas Staff blames the victims:
whats funny to me is if anything would have given spammers a reason to
exploit open relays it would have been the blacklists. I mean when
you
arbitrarily blacklist millions of their ISP's addresses you leave them with
no other option.
"if anything would give burglars a reason to break windows, it would
have been locked doors. i mean, when you put locks on millions of
doors, you leave them with no other option."
Yes, there are some "burglars". But the open relay situation is much more
like gas pumps: Anyone can drive up and put gas in. That doesn't give them
the right to drive off without paying.
people who send spam *always* have the option of changing their line of
work.
Nonsense. Real spammers, advertizing real products and real services have
the legal right to do so. Blacklists have no legal right to block them.
Exactis V. MAPS, CAN-SPAM.
Real spammers have no reason to abuse open relays. And if they did use
them without permission, they would be easily blocked, easily found, and
then billed for those services. In 9 years, we've never found real
spammers abusing our relays. But we have found anti-spammers abusing them;
We've found anti-spammers soliciting abuse for them; We've found
anti-spammers telling people that open relays are free; And we've found
anti-spammers doing other mischief. The "open relay" problem, is purely
due to anti-spammers. The operational response: Prevent anti-spammers
from discovering the relays, and you prevent abuse. Real spammers aren't
searching for open relays, either.
--Dean
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