Re: IESG Statement on Spam Control on IETF Mailing Lists

[Henrik Levkowetz <[e-mail]>]

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
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