Hi, On 2008-04-14 17:39 IESG Secretary said the following: > The following principles apply to spam control on IETF mailing lists: > > * IETF mailing lists MUST provide spam control. > * Such spam control SHOULD track accepted practices used on the Internet. > * IETF mailing lists MUST provide a mechanism for legitimate technical > participants to bypass moderation, challenge-response, or other techniques > that would interfere with a prompt technical debate on the mailing list > without requiring such participants to receive list traffic.
Umm -- I think I understand what this *intends* to say, but I'm not sure. What I'm reading it as actually saying, though, is that a poster who thinks he is a legitimate technical participant is to be provided means of *bypassing* moderation. A means of bypassing challenge-response could be to send a mail to one of the list admins to forward to the list, but since moderation is (at least normally) provided by the list admins, and essentially any human who receives a message and is asked to forward it to the list will have to judge whether the message is relevant and appropriate, which constitutes moderation as I understand it, the statement above seems to imply that there has to be some way, untouched by a human making any kind of evaluation, to force a message to be posted to a list??? It would be rather helpful for an explanation or rationale to be provided for a statement such as the above, which to me reads as a very categorical statement that no kind of challenge-response, moderation, or other reasonable guard against spam can be put in place without extraordinary efforts at providing means to *force* a circumvention of the same. I'm pretty sure that the third bullet above isn't intended to almost completely nullify the first bullet, but I'm actually not sure how to set up anything but painstaking manual inspection of every spam in order to adhere to the third bullet as written. None of the mechanisms currently available, including TMDA, spam-assassin, and blocking of posts from non-subscribers followed by manual inspection seems to fulfil this as I read it, which leaves me at a loss. > * IETF mailing lists MUST provide a mechanism for legitimate technical > participants to determine if an attempt to post was dropped as apparent > spam. Again, an umm... I'm not sure I'm aware of an available technical solution which out-of-the-box will ensure this is followed, without at the same time resulting in a deluge of back-scatter. If there was a SHOULD here, I could imagine working over a bit of time at setting up Mailman to drop-and-archive, but currently the solution which comes to mind is to reject, which (I believe) potentially will result in backscatter and more work and/or junk for the list admin. Overall, I'm slightly surprised at how categorical several of the statements above are, without providing rationale and background information which would have made it possible to fully understand them. It seems as if they are presented as decrees from on-high which have to be followed even if they aren't understood to be sensible or implementable... > * The Internet draft editor, RFC editor, IESG secretary, IETF chair and > IANA MUST be able to post to IETF mailing lists. The relevant identity > information for these roles will be added to any white-list mechanism used > by an IETF mailing list. > * There MUST be a mechanism to complain that a message was inappropriately > blocked. > > The realization of these principles is expected to change over time. > List moderators, working group chairs and area directors are expected to > interpret these principles reasonably and within the context of IETF > policy and philosophy. > > This supercedes a previous IESG statement on this topic: > http://www.ietf.org/IESG/STATEMENTS/mail-submit-policy.txt > That statement contains justification and implementation advice that may > be helpful to anyone applying these principles. > > A separate IESG statement applies to moderation of IETF mailing lists: > http://www.ietf.org/IESG/STATEMENTS/moderated-lists.txt Henrik _______________________________________________ IETF mailing list IETF@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf