Subject: Question on list management and stupid corporate firewall policies

From: Dean Willis <[email-masked]>
Date: 19 Dec 2002 17:31:12 -0600

One of the joys of being a chair is managing the mailing list, and
consequently getting the list-admin messages that result. Some of these
are actually useful, for example indicating that users have gotten
laid-off and not bothered to unsubscribe.

However, there are a certain class of response messages that one might
call "Stupid Firewall Tricks", and I'm looking for guidance on dealing
with them.

For example, the letter X is often used as a variable in equations,
addresses, phone numbers, and the like. But put three of them in a row,
and somebody's spam filter is going to think the containing message
needs to be censored. Consequently, the message is not delivered to the
recipient, and the list admin gets another message to download and
delete.

Or here's another one. Every secretariat announcement of a new draft or
RFC contains a MIME indirect body part giving a URL reference to the
document on the IETF server. Pretty cool, right? But a bunch of virus
filters have decided that, since they can't actually scan the indirected
part, they can't let the message through (or must strip off the MIME
part). And of course, they let the list admin know

After I get enough of these from any source, I usually start trying to
let the IETF participant affected know about the problem and deal with
it. Sometimes this works -- clueful types have often gotten problems
fixed in a matter of minutes. But then there's the poor wretches who
have corporate IT departments staffed by prison-guard-wannabes intent
on exercising a though-control policy that would make Orwell proud.

So, do we have guidelines on dealing with these people? Should we ask
their IT guys to work within the guidelines of a BCP? Do we just ask the
unfortunate victim to hire a reasonable ISP? Should we administratively
set offenders to "nomail" or unsubscribe them forcefully?

Or do we just vent to our colleagues and go back to pressing the
"delete" key and wondering why our GSM bills are so large?

Tips, tricks, and guidance requested. Yes, I have a bunch of procmail
recipes that manage to sequester the most common responses, but no, I
haven't adequately solved the problem that way. Maybe we could just add
a whole lot of spam-filter-tripping-words to every message -- at least
that way, only the fun-party people would show up at meetings.

And by the way, may your midwinter observances, should there be any, be
appropriately fortuitous and rewarding.

-- 
Dean Willis <[email-masked]>

---

From: Paul Hoffman / VPNC <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 20 Dec 2002 10:45:54 -0800

At 5:31 PM -0600 12/19/02, Dean Willis wrote:
>So, do we have guidelines on dealing with these people?

Between IMC and VPNC, I run dozens of lists for various WGs. My 
guideline is "one nice note to the WG member, give it a week to be 
fixed, remove the WG member if it persists and tell them why in a way 
they can tell the IS folks". In the cases where the latter had to 
happen, it almost always gets fixed in under a day.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium

---

From: "Kurt D. Zeilenga" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 20 Dec 2002 10:59:27 -0800

>"delete" key and wondering why our GSM bills are so large?

Well, I just let my list management software deal with bounces.
I consider it a feature that it doesn't bother me about occasional
bounced messages and automatically unsubscribes addresses which
repeatedly bounce.

Kurt