At 12:02 AM -0800 2/10/01, Chuq Von Rospach wrote:
>Not closing your lists to subscriber-only posting is like coming home Friday
>night, smelling gas from a leak, and deciding to wait to call the plumber
>until Monday so you don't have to pay weekend rates.
No, it's like having weighed (obvious) positive value and the (not so
obvious to the outside world) negative aspects. The lists in question
are IETF working groups and ex-working groups. The IETF has generally
kept its lists open so that there is the same kind of
cross-pollination that was mentioned earlier. There have been a few
closed lists, and the closing has often caused problems such as
important attempts at cross-pollination being shut off and the
initiator not bothering to try a second time.
> You're betting it won't
>get worse, it's sure not going to get better on its own, and it's really
>likely to blow up sooner or later, and the only guarantee you have is that
>when it DOES blow up, you'll be on deadline, busy, or on vacation.
Thanks for guarantee; how will you enforce it? :-)
On all of these lists, the spam level is usually less than two a
week. (Some of these lists have been around for >10 years, FWIW.)
That's a lot to some people, but next to nothing for other people.
Some lists have gotten hammered, and the easy solution was to change
the list address. Some lists are, in fact, closed, with the WG chair
having to do the moderating. In those cases, I usually get complaints
from them after a while because Majordomo's bounces don't make it
easy to repost.
We all make tradeoffs, even about spam. (And for those of you who are
about to call me a spam-coddler, please remember that IMC has been at
the forefront of the anti-spam effort for over five years.) We have
different constraints, just as there are different constraints on
managers of sports-related lists and of abuse-victim lists.
--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium
