Subject: Draft Message to WG Chairs re TMDA in Front of Mailman

From: "Fuller, Barbara" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2007 09:24:07 -0400

Dear IETF WG Chairs,

Many of you have indicated that your WG mailing lists hosted at ietf.org
receive large volumes of spam, which makes moderating the lists
difficult.  The Secretariat has been experimenting with inserting
"Tagged Message Delivery Agent" (TMDA) in front of Mailman lists, and
the experiment has been quite successful in reducing the number of spam
message that reach these lists.  Therefore, we would like to offer this
service to all WG chairs who are interested in taking advantage of it.

The measures used by TMDA to thwart spam include:

(a) Whitelists: accepting mail from known, trusted senders.

(b) Blacklists: refusing mail from undesirable senders (i.e., known
spammers).

(c) Challenge/Response: allowing unknown senders who are not on the
Whitelist or Blacklist the chance to confirm that their messages are
legitimate (at which time they are added to the Whitelist).

For IETF, the Whitelist includes every address that is subscribed to any
IETF mailing list, and the Blacklist includes any addresses that the
list administrators request be placed on them (i.e., because of repeated
spamming).  A sender who is new to the IETF would need to respond to the
challenge only once in order to be Whitelisted.

We plan to implement TMDA on the WG mailing lists beginning on Monday,
April 16th, and hope to complete the process in approximately one month.
If you do *not* want TMDA inserted in front of your WG list, then we
would appreciate hearing from you by no later than Friday, April 13th.
If we do not hear from you by 5:30 ET on that date, then we will assume
that you want us to proceed.  Each list administrator will be notified
by e-mail when TMDA had been inserted in front of his or her WG mailing
list.

Once again, this program is voluntary, so please be sure to let us know
if you wish to "opt out."

Best Regards,

Barbara Fuller
for the IETF Secretariat.