Subject: censorware on ietf mailing lists?

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 14 Dec 2003 15:01:22 -0500

I just saw a message that was forwarded to the [email-masked] list by 
spamassassin.
Apparently spamassassin decided it was spam but forwarded to the list 
anyway with explanation of why it thought it was spam.  Not only was 
the message legitimate (it was an I-D announcement) but it reveals just 
how bogus the criteria used by spamassassin were:

- it says the From field does not have a real name.  Guess what, that's 
perfectly legitimate.
- it incorrectly says that the To field has a malformed address because 
it uses group syntax, even though this is a perfectly legitimate use of 
group syntax.
- it trusts blacklists, even though these have been known to be 
unreliable, to use dubious criteria, or even to misrepresent the facts
- it claims that the MIME boundary is indicative of spam, even though 
it's also perfectly legitimate.

In other words, there's nothing wrong with the message, and it's not 
spam by any stretch of the imagination, and yet it's being labelled as 
"probably spam".

The last thing we need is to have such poorly chosen criteria used to 
filter IETF list traffic.

Please consider this a formal objection to this practice.  Even if 
spamassassin is being configured to forward the messages, it's doing so 
in such a way as to make the actual message very difficult to read.

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From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 14 Dec 2003 15:20:03 -0500

oops.  apparently this message was somehow fed back from the list by 
somebody's machine,
not by a spamassassin at ietf.org.  sorry about that.

---

From: Tim Chown <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 14 Dec 2003 22:54:14 +0000

> not by a spamassassin at ietf.org.  sorry about that.

Regardless, I think the particular method used by the IETF announce list
to "attach" content causes problems for some more cautious systems.   I've
not seen any other lists use a similar method.

Tim

---

From: Franck Martin <[email-masked]>
Date: 15 Dec 2003 10:59:38 +1200

I tottally support the criterias used by Spamassassin even if they are
RFC compliants...

We need some tools to help us clean the SPAM. Yes there are some false
positives, but I have less of them than SPAM...

I clean most of my mailbox by looking a the SPAM header, without having
to read all that junk...

I think we will argue here on how we can fight SPAM and how can IETF
help it... There are tools out there, but this is not a perfect
science...

Cheers

> in such a way as to make the actual message very difficult to read.

----
Franck Martin
[email-masked]
SOPAC, Fiji
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