Subject: Re: Mail sent to midcom (fwd)

From: "James P. Salsman" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 2 Feb 2001 01:57:09 -0800 (PST)

Lloyd,

I second your request:

>>... unless you have a specific request for a ... IESG statement,
> 
> I'd like a statement that RFC2418 will be adhered to by mailing lists.

So would I.  I use multiple email addresses:  [local-subaddr]@bovik.org, 
[email-masked], etc. -- like thousands of other people.  And as people 
on this list should know by now, I value pseudonymity and anonymity in 
the rare circumstances that they are necessary and in the common 
circumstances that they are sufficient.

Lately, the only clear need for this kind of thing has been those
virus-alert email warnings.  What's next, computer-prion alerts?  
("Warning:  This message was edited by the author and not approved 
by the U.N. Department of Culture!  Further perusal of this message 
might eat away at your brain.  This message brought to you by a 
robot authorized to prevent you from seeing what its creator thinks 
you shouldn't."  :)

My local USENET newsgroups have a "cancelcritter" that uses a 
rule-based system to decide what articles are velveeta.  The fact that 
it operates behind the scenes is pretty strange.  If it would only 
summarize the subject lines and source addresses of the messages it 
has cancelled on a regular basis, that would be great.  But because it 
does, some people claim that it often makes mistakes, and so it is 
another one of the many similar reasons that cancels are often ignored 
by news admins these days.

Similarly, instead of moderating non-subscriber messages, the default 
for mailing lists should be to pass them through unless the conditions 
described in:

>>     http://www.ietf.org/IESG/STATEMENTS/moderated-lists.txt

in particular:

>... 'persistent' and 'excessive'....

are detected.  So, for example, if you have the tenth non-subscriber 
message in the last hour on a list that usually gets ten messages a 
day, then maybe it is time to start holding them for the moderator.

Similarly, for "middle boxes," if you are keeping statistics on the 
packets you are forwarding, and all the sudden the proportion of SYNs
from a particular neighbor spikes, maybe it is time to emulate a 
source quench on that neighbor.  (Or heck, why not even send a few 
ICMP source quenches just to say you did.)

And now, for the "thinking outside the box" economic analogy for this 
class of problems.  Lately, I've been running a data collection 
routine that is intended to promote reading literacy using internet 
technologies:
  http://www.bovik.org/reps-char.cgi

Roughly half of the example children represented in the data presented 
by that script are poor readers for their age level.  Why are they poor 
readers?  Because they live in poor school districts with large class 
sizes and insufficient insitutional support.  Why are they in those
circumstances?  Because their wealthy metropolitan neighbors are so 
carefully concerned with the education of their own children, that 
the often carefully adjust the flow of funds to limit the distribution 
based on "performance" such that the schools that already have the 
smaller class sizes and the best paid teachers get more money, and no 
progress in class size or teacher salaries is made in the 
poorly-performing schools.

So, just as some list administrators limit the ability to post in a 
timely fashion to those already subscribed, many states have 
complicated school funds distribution formulas which act to limit the 
resources needed for good education to those who already have them.  
In both cases, it is done in the interest of protecting a resource, 
ease of communication or reading literacy ability, by hoarding it to 
those who already have it.

The analogious solution to the one proposed above would be similar to 
the Bush education plan, which only cuts off funds after three years 
of poor school performance.

Cheers,
James

---

From: James M Galvin <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 02 Feb 2001 10:29:04 -0500 (EST)

Your suggestion to automate the detection of "persistent and excessive"
could work for people and would help "throttle down" those discussions
that need it from time to time, but it would not protect an elist from
spam.

With only one exception of which I am aware (and its not midcom), the
only reason for the "moderation" is to identify spam and to prevent such
one-off messages from ever getting to the subscribers.

Jim

On Fri, 2 Feb 2001, James P. Salsman wrote:

    Date: Fri, 02 Feb 2001 01:57:09 -0800 (PST)
    From: James P. Salsman <[email-masked]>
    To: [email-masked]
    Cc: [email-masked]
    Subject: Re: Mail sent to midcom (fwd)
    
    Lloyd,

    

    

    

    

    
    
    Cheers,
    James

---

From: "James P. Salsman" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 2 Feb 2001 08:03:38 -0800 (PST)

Jim,

> that need it from time to time, but it would not protect an elist from

Neither does non-subscriber moderation.  List spammers can subscribe 
first, from throw-away 3rd party accounts for example.

The only way to completely block spam is prior restraint, which causes:

  - subjective judgements on borderline cases

  - need for moderator(s) to be on line often

  - delays in posting for everyone

  - other forums to become more useful

None of those disadvantages are acceptable, as reflected in the official 
IETF Working Group guidelines.

People who are not used to spam and incapable of ignoring it probably 
do not have the kind of experience with the internet which would help 
the IETF serve its mission and advance the state of the art, anyway.

Having said that, if there is going to be a rule-based system in place 
to detect "persistent and excessive" posts to a list and spool such 
messages depending upon parameters such as subscriber/nonsubscriber 
source address, here are some more suggestions for paramters:

  - Redundancy.  Messages substantially similar to recent messages (based
    on similarities seen in the virus warning floods of the past few months
    on the ietf list) might be held for a moderator to examine at his or
    her convienience.

  - HTML email.  I am not the only one who would like to see HTML 
    messages replaced with a message saying "This message contained 
    only HTML; to view it, please visit  http://www.ietf.org/...."

  - Size.  Messages over several dozen kilobytes could be truncated and 
    similar archive pointer URLs placed at the beginning and end of the
    list-sent message with a similar explanatory blurb.

However, I would advise not including rules based on substrings (e.g., 
"make money fa$t" etc.) because that is an endless game of cat-and-mouse.

Cheers,
James