RE: Dan Bernstein's issues about namedroppers list operation

["Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <[e-mail]>]

There is a proposal to start an IRTF research group on the topic of
SPAM. Perhaps one of the things that could be looked at is how mailing
lists could apply spam defenses and still maintain open-ness.

Many of the problems with spam are now the second order effects of
dropped messages that should have been forwarded.

By default SpamAssasin is configured to consult a blacklist that is
currently blocking all UUNET addresses because the maintainer does not
like something that a UUNET subscriber is publishing on their site. I
conclude that blacklists of that type will not last long as the Internet
starts to re-route arround the censorship damage.


That said, there is an old proverb in politics about what you should do
when you become the story. I think the issues that concern the group
members here are more than just the alleged filtering of Bernstein's
posts.


		Phill

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Keith Moore [mailto:[e-mail]]
> Sent: Friday, January 10, 2003 8:00 PM
> To: Thomas Narten
> Cc: [e-mail]; [e-mail]; [e-mail]; [e-mail];
> [e-mail]
> Subject: Re: Dan Bernstein's issues about namedroppers list operation
> 
> 
> 
> > Specifically, all mail sent to namedroppers is:
> > 
> > 1) first run through spamassassin. Mail that is rejected here is not
> >    archived, as the number of such messages is large. All 
> mail sent to
> >    mailing lists on the server hosting namedroppers is run though
> >    spamassassin, so this is not a namedroppers-specific procedure.
> 
> SpamAssissin needs to be shot.  Most of its criteria are 
> really poorly chosen.
> Even if its criteria are good at identifying spam on a large 
> scale (with few 
> false positives) that doesn't mean they will work well for a 
> narrowly-focused 
> discussion.  In my experience SpamAssassin has too high a 
> false positive rate
> to be trusted without human review as a backup.
> 
> Keith
> 
> p.s. regarding messages that did not make it to the 
> namedroppers archive -
> are the IETF archives still using to/cc message headers to 
> decide which 
> archive a message should be stored in?   if so, is it 
> possible that a message
> which was sent to multiple lists might be archived in only 
> one of those lists?
> 
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