Date: Thu, 4 Apr 2002 16:46:08 -0800 From: "Philip J. Koenig" <pjklist@ekahuna.com> To: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Cc: Benjamin Krueger <benjamin@macguire.net> Subject: Re: hub.freebsd.org spam policy Message-ID: <20020405004608582.AAA398@empty1.ekahuna.com@pc02.ekahuna.com> In-Reply-To: <20020404152615.F2470@rain.macguire.net> References: <3cacebac.f8c.1804289383@subdimension.com>; from irado@subdimension.com on Fri, Apr 05, 2002 at 12:11:24AM %2B0000
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On 4 Apr 2002, at 15:26, Benjamin Krueger boldly uttered: > * irado (irado@subdimension.com) [020404 15:11]: > > > Poorly implemented and arbitrary "anti-spam" blocking is worse than > > > none at all, and we will continue to see innocent people getting > > > unnecessarily inconvenienced as a result. > > > > > > Meanwhile, if messages like the following are any indication, these > > > "anti-spam" measures aren't even particularly effective for their > > > primary purpose. > > > > > > > > > [sent to questions@freebsd.org] > > > > > >>Date: Thu, 04 Apr 2002 06:30:34 -0600 > > >>From: "Phongsin Ch" <Phongsin.Ch@sanmina-sci.com> > > >>Subject: Get more money by e-commerce business . > > >> > > > > > > > > > > > > cool.. very cool. I am being upset by these 'anti-spam' > > cause that I am obliged to use my webmail account to deliver > > posts to the list, which is boring. > > > > BTW, will somebody realy take care on this?? > > If the spam filtering that the lists implement are not to your > liking, perhaps you can volunteer to help maintain better ones? > Filtering is not a perfect science. It isn't even close. Well yanno, I'd be glad to contribute, but the attitude of whoever answers "postmaster@freebsd.org" has been consistently uninterested in my POV on the matter so far. I consider myself lucky to have finally gotten the ability to send email to the lists or to postmaster without it bouncing back. (and I had to make changes to my email client in order to do so -- something that has *never* been necessary with any list or recipient I have emailed in the last 7 years or so I've been using this email client) > I am told that the FreeBSD mailing lists are some of the largest active > lists on the internet. I don't have any statistics to quote, but if this is > true, I would say that 1 spam per day out of nearly a hundred valid posts is > an excellent record. We usually don't even get that. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but until very recently the FreeBSD lists didn't even require subscription validation to post messages - there was a big debate about it recently if I'm not mistaken. If true, freebsd.org is so out of touch with modern realities of operating public lists that I have little sympathy for their problems with spam, whether or not they operate particularly big lists or not. (it's extremely ironic that the debate at the time revolved around this utopian fantasy that people should be able to post to the list without ever "subscribing"... yet with their current implementation of arbitrary filtering, they are in fact intentionally blocking various perfectly innocent users and longtime subscribers from using the lists, people who have nothing at all to do with "spam") > Calling the filters poor and abritrary is unfair at best, and ignorant at > worst. The filters that the FreeBSD mailing lists use are common, and found in > lists across the internet. You are just plain wrong. I am not at all unfamiliar with antispam measures, I have debated them for years and I run mail systems for a variety of domains. If these measures were so common, why is it that freebsd.org (and only recently) was the only organization out of hundreds or thousands that have been recipients of my email messages that has ever cared about this particular detail that they used as an excuse to not only block me from posting to the lists, but even from emailing postmaster? To quote from my last message to the person who answered postmaster@freeebsd.org email (and, I might add, never responded to these comments and others): > [freebsd.org person claims their filters are justified by "RFCs"] > > > in particular, using them for "postmaster@domain" email is a highly > questionable practice. Since you brought up RFC's, how about this > quote from RFC 2821: > > > > SMTP systems are expected to make every reasonable effort to accept > > mail directed to Postmaster from any other system on the Internet. > > In extreme cases --such as to contain a denial of service attack or > > other breach of security-- an SMTP server may block mail directed to > > Postmaster. However, such arrangements SHOULD be narrowly tailored > > so as to avoid blocking messages which are not part of such attacks. > If you run a well maintained mail host, you > shouldn't have problems. If you're forced to use a mail host which breaks some > internet curtosies, is part of a banned netblock, or otherwise misbehaves, I'm > very sorry but this is how the internet works (or doesn't work). Wrong wrong wrong wrong. It's awfully convenient when trying to justify one's own unilateral actions, to assert that "that's just the way the internet works", but it's not only often just a figment of that person's imagination, it's often just damn arrogant. For example, if some over-zealous "parental filter" company decides that the word "breast" is evil and therefore blocks it from anyone who is using their parental filtering utility, it doesn't give them the justification to say to those who complain about not being able to reach sites on breast cancer that "it's just the way the internet works". Some sites in the USA are blocking the network address range from entire countries like China as an "antispam measure", because they're too lazy (or don't consider it important) to go to the effort to use a method that doesn't cause so much collateral damage. So when a chinese-american customer contacts them to complain that they can no longer communicate with their relatives back home, are they going to get told "that's just how the internet works"? How arrogant and obnoxious that is. > Petition your provider for better mail service, or help to clean up the dirty relays in your > netblock. I have no "provider", I run the show. And the problem isn't "dirty relays", and it isn't "poor mail service". The problem is flawed, careless, presumptuous and inconsiderate "anti-spam" filters which are arbitrary and which are not narrowly-tailored. > Finally, the mailing lists are free resources, like everything else here. > They are maintained by volunteers, and as such are not a right. Appreciate > what we do have, and help to improve it, rather than bitching about a free > resource that somebody else isn't keeping up to your standards. How ironic, that that is precisely what I am doing. You just apparently believe that only your vision of "spam filtering" is the "correct" one. I happen to think poor spam filtering degrades the quality of the list. It certainly ends up blocking a significant number of perfectly innocent users from taking advantage of the lists. I'm tired of the "throw the baby out with the bathwater" approaches. In the olden days, we called it "net abuse". -- Philip J. Koenig pjklist@ekahuna.com Electric Kahuna Systems -- Computers & Communications for the New Millenium To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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