[e2e] latest spate of cruft postings to e2e

[Joe Touch]

David G. Andersen wrote:

> On Thu, Nov 06, 2003 at 09:42:23PM +0000, Joe Touch quacked:
> 
>>White lists assume that all white-listed senders make the same
>>decision on what is spam that you do. This is a known failure of that
>>assumption.
>>
>>Users are free to use whatever filters they prefer, however the
>>configuration of this list is not (and cannot be) optimized for all
>>receiver's configurations. 
> 
>   I sent this privately, but since the discussion appears to
> be continuing, I'll repeat a bit of it to the list.
> 
>   This is somewhat misleading.  The list maintainer is in
> the perfect position to do whitelisting, and the list subscribers
> are in no position to do whitelisting.

The subscription list is a subset of those who might post, as I 
mentioned before.

I appreciate that whitelisting is harder on the receive end of a list 
(you can still do it, and will end up accumulating some of the list 
anyway). The content filters we use are not perfect, but neither is 
whitelisting.

>  As the list maintainer,
> you know quite well 99% of the people who are both authorized
> and likely to post to the list.  As subscribers, we don't have
> the subscription list (and don't want it).
> 
>   Furthermore, spam filtering post-list is very ineffective
> compared to pre-list.  Once the spam reaches the e2e mailing
> list, it's likely to get through most of our filters because
> we're restricted to looking at content at that point.  The
> list gets to look at the sender IP, the real received
> headers, etc., etc.

Most modern filters include content for exactly the reasons you observe.

>   It's becoming quite clear that the onus of spam filtering
> is and should be on the maintainer of the list, and that we,
> your subscribers, have placed our trust in you to do that
> filtering as well as possible, using all of the tools you have
> at hand to accomplish it.

It is not the mission of this list to demonstrate how to limit spam. For 
that, please consider the IETF spam discussion lists.

As I said before, the purpose of spam filters on this list is to reduce 
bandwidth. You are encouraged to use filters on your end.

>   Since legitimate mail is already periodically sent to the
> list maintainer, the occasional additional non-subscriber post
> shouldn't add much to that burden.   As Perry noted, this
> problem has been very well-studied by maintainers of other
> mailing lists, and subscriber-based posting restrictions
> are one of the best solutions.
> 
>   -Dave

As noted above, "best" depends on the goal of the list.

At this point, I believe I have sufficiently explained our position on 
the configuration of the list. I will try to summarize this information 
in detail and post it on the web pages to avoid future rehashing.

Joe