From: Wayne.Brown@altec.com
To: David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org>
cc: Joseph Carter <knghtbrd@debian.org>, john slee <indigoid@higherplane.net>,
        Colonel <klink@clouddancer.com>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Message-ID: <86256A29.00538AAD.00@smtpnotes.altec.com>
Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2001 10:12:24 -0500
Subject: Re: goodbye
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Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org


David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org> wrote:

>"self-appointed"

>
>Are you implying that the people who run ORBS and the other RBL lists
>actually hacked into vger.kernel.org and changed the MTA configuration to
>use those lists? I was of the opinion that it was a free choice made by the
>administrators of that machine.

OK, "self-appointed" was too strong a term.  What ORBS and its ilk do is provide
a simple, easy-to-use method of blocking large chunks of the net from
communicating with other large chunks, regardless of whether the systems blocked
are assisting in spam propagation or not.  The *possibility* of someday being
guilty is enough to quarantine them.  Granted, it requires the cooperation of
other administrators to accomplish that.

I'm not denying that the administrators of mailing lists have the right to
control what happens on their lists.  It's just that I'm personally opposed to
spam-blocking methods that go above the level of a single system, or maybe even
a single user.  My primary email account gets tons of spam every day.  Often I
get three or more copies of the same spam, demonstrating both that my address
has been harvested from multiple locations and that the spammers are clueless
about managing their own mailing lists.  Yet the only defense I use is my delete
key (and a personal resolve never to do business with any of those companies
under any circumstances).  I just accept the fact that only one out of every
dozen or so emails I receive will be of any interest to me.  The rest vanish
without wasting more than a few seconds of my day.  It's not even worth setting
up killfiles, although that would eliminate most of my repeat offenders.

If individual mailing list administrators want to block email from certain sites
because of spam concerns, fine.  But I still hold organizations like ORBS, that
encourage such things and make it easy, in contempt.  They conjure up an image
for me of those annoying "hall monitors" in grade school who were always hoping
to find someone breaking a rule, so they could tattle on them.

>Can we take this pointlessness off l-k now please?

Your message included l-k in the headers, so my response does also.  But I have
no intention of carrying on this discussion any further, in public or private,
so this is the last post you'll see from me on the subject.

Wayne


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