Subject: Policy on Spam control on IETF mailing lists

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 12 May 2005 15:08:23 +0300

Hi all,

I was just wondering if we have any policy on how to handle pure spam
on mailing lists.  I am using an IETF mailing list, and I have the options
from MAILMAN on how to handle spam, including automatically discarding mail
from some email addresses.  I'm getting fed-up with randomly generated
spam that I'd just like to automatically reject spam from such senders.
I know it is a losing cause, but it would at least make me feel better.

thoughts?
John

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From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 May 2005 18:19:15 +0200

I would be very leery of doing any automatic discards. There's just too high
a risk of discarding an occasional good one.

    Brian (another mailman victim)

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From: Bill Fenner <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 May 2005 10:07:02 -0700

>a risk of discarding an occasional good one.

I think it depends.  Do you think [email-masked] will ever
legitimately need to post to an ietf mailing list?

The current wording of the draft spam policy says that people
have to be able to know that their message was discarded; that
would mean using the mailman "reject" option (which sends a message
back, which might bounce, which might get you more mail to discard)
or implement a web page that lists messages that have been discarded.
I don't think that anyone has integrated the latter functionality
into mailman yet, though; there are some good pieces floating around
but I don't think they've been put together.

(It's on my plate to make one wording tweak to this draft, which was
first discussed on wgchairs in Feb 2004, and run it by wgchairs@ again)

  Bill