Re: [89attendees] spam on old lists - was Fw: new important message

[[e-mail]]

>Having fought with DNSBL providers, I think the BLACK part of the name is
>appropriate ... as in BLACK HOLE re. any hope of rational resolution.

There are hundreds of DNSBL providers, most of whom are incompentent,
but nobody uses their lists so it doesn't matter.  There are a few
that are competent and have very low error rates.  They, not
surprisingly, are the ones everyone uses.  When I say everyone, I mean
it -- every mail system of any size uses them as part of their spam
filtering because they have to. They're awful but less awful than the
alternatives.

In this particular case, filtering by From: address on mailing lists
still works well enough, particularly here where the participants tend
to be technically sophisticated and so are somewhat less likely to get
their accounts p3ned than average users.  So I agree that we might as
well turn off useless old meeting lists, but I don't see any need to
twiddle things beyond that.

R's,
John

PS:

>>    We _could_ in principle work up protocols to replace zero-maintenance
>> blacklists as "the solution" to spam. I tried, the last time the topic
>> was hot; but totally failed to get anything that wasn't trivial to bypass.

I don't think that's a failure of imagination, it's in the nature of
systems with malicious participants.  It's not unrelated to the
observation that you wouldn't want to join a club that would have you
as a member.