Re: Handling spam on gnu.org mailing lists

[Russ Allbery]

Greg A Woods <address@hidden> writes:
> [ On , April 7, 2001 at 17:10:34 (-0700), Russ Allbery wrote: ]

>> I think the gnu.org -bug lists should be open to all comers.  -bug
>> lists are by nature high-noise, and people who can't deal with a bit of
>> spam aren't going to be able to deal with the truckloads of poorly
>> specified and mostly unusable bug reports either.

> That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

The unstated additional point that I assumed everyone would realize
without having it specifically spelled out is that making it easy for
people to submit bug reports regardless of whether some black hole list is
temporarily unhappy with their ISP is a good idea, and that bouncing
people's attempts to help with software packages because of events outside
of their control gives the project a bad image.

The difference between the -bug lists and the other gnu.org lists is that
the majority of messages to the -bug lists are from non-subscribers, while
for other mailing lists the opposite is true.

> The dilema of course is that one cannot have one without the other.  If
> blocks are implemented at the SMTP level(*) then you cannot easily allow
> all messages from any authorised subscriber regardless of whether or not
> the subscriber's MTA would otherwise be blocked. 

I'm happy to report that the gcc mailing lists have been doing this for
some time now.  They don't seem to find it particularly difficult,
although I'm not familiar with how hard the underlying implementation was.

Given your confrontational and aggressive communication style, I'm not
particularly interested in discussing this further with you if you still
don't understand my point.  Even where you're right, it's just not worth
my time to try to find your technical arguments under the absolutist "of
course I'm right" presentation.

-- 
Russ Allbery (address@hidden)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>