Re: Fully functional email address

[Paul Wouters <[e-mail]>]

On Jun 16, 2025, at 16:11, Stephen Farrell <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> 
> Hiya,
> 
> As far as the subject line goes: I think we ought be accommodating
> if we can and not try insist that a few people who make odd choices
> about email all have whatever we consider 'fully functioning email'
> (but that we haven't documented;-).

I disagree. If we tolerate it of a few people, we need to tolerate it from everyone and soon the ietf becomes a forum of autoresponders with ChatGPT challenges and fire hydrant puzzles talking to each other drowning out real contributions.

But in this case the auto responders adds legalese too:

I'm a rather primitive computer program, and I'm not sure whether your
message is bulk mail.

If you reply to this notice, you are (1) acknowledging that [recipient]
does not want to receive bulk mail; (2) confirming that your
message is not part of a bulk mailing; and (3) agreeing to pay [recipient]
$250 if your message is part of a bulk mailing.

When using my official dayjob email address, should I consult my company lawyer on this? If the cc: is an email list, is it bulk? Does mailman add a Bulk: header to the list copy they receive ?

There is also text in there that if the From: matches a certain email address than it is a forgery because the sender auto responder bot claims that address is not used for any mailing lists by its human, yet that’s exactly the email addresses that sent it to me, so if following this senders own autoresponder, I must treat their email as a forgery. Should I now make educational guesses as to whether which part of the auto responder is valid or ignorable ?

Offloading your spam problem to manual actions of others is wrong and it doesn’t scale for all of us. Therefore we should not tolerate it from anyone. 

Adding legal requirements on email distributions of IETF mailing lists violates RFC 2026 and its successor process documents.

> I know of a handful of IETF participants (maybe 4-5) who make useful
> contributions and where one has to jump through hoops to have an
> email conversation. I think that's fine.

So I respectfully disagree that I need to accommodate these demands. Making useful contributions is not a waiver for bad (and costly) behaviour.


> In the current case, where such a person is appealing WG/AD actions,
> then I think we should go even further to accommodate them, because
> that is the right thing to do.

Someone claiming that we MUST follow our rules via form and legalese that violates our rules seems a rather ironic situation.

Based on a combination of the above, I facilitated them by taking the effort to explain what minor changes they could do in a resubmitted email to conform to our process so I could process the appeal. Note that these minor changes did not include “must use a fully functional email address”, although I warned them that if the discussion would become deemed off topic, I would have no valid method to respond to their email offlist.

I will also note that this was the third appeal of this person in a very short time and that they appealed two AD decisions to the IESG and those two to the IAB, and all four appeals were denied. I would like to remind people of https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/statement-iesg-on-appeals-of-iesg-and-area-director-actions-and-decisions-20071004/

“The IESG further wishes to highlight that the primary aim of the appeals mechanism set out there is to resolve conflicts and move the IETF as a whole towards consensus, and it urges all participants to approach them in that light”

Seeing the amount of effort spent by the Responsible ADs, the IESG and the IAB, I think we can ask such a person to avoid any ambiguity about Note Well by sending one more email to the Responsible AD, and that furthermore the community had already been immensely accommodating and we have seen little to no good will in return.

Paul