ned+ietf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote: > You're completely missing the point. This issue isn't knowing how to build a > large scale email system and I never said it was. Rather, the issue is whether > or not people's opinions about the effectiveness of various antispam mechanisms > are valid when all they have is a small amount of experience, often quite > dated. Granted that it's always dangerous to extrapolate from a small sample. But is anybody's experience valid, then? >From my perspective, the guys who run these large email systems generally seem to believe that they have to do whatever they're doing, regardless of how much the filtering criteria that they're using have any thing to do with the desirability of the mail to the recipient, and regardless of any particular sender's or recipient's actual experience with having their mail filtered. IOW, It's very easy for both the individual and the mail system operator to find reasons to disregard the other's experience. Who is to say who is right? I certainly don't think that a mail system operator's actions to filter mail without the recipient's consent are inherently justified just because they happen operating a mail system. They do bear some responsibility for their role in this process and in their selection of filtering criteria. -- As for Ted's message, I just thought it was an interesting anecdote, and (as others have pointed out) not particularly relevant to the DNSBL discussion. I didn't see anything wrong with him posting it, and don't understand why it's provoked such a reaction. -- And as for DNSBLs - clearly, there are both good and bad aspects to using third party reputation services as opposed to sites using their own filtering criteria. e.g.: benefits of third party reputation services: - when the number of "customers" of a reputation service helps defray the cost of maintaining a current and accurate list, and of improving their criteria over time - when the high visibility of a popular reputation service helps keep it honest drawbacks of third party reputation services: - when a widely used reputation service is wrong in a way that affects a large number of sites, whereas when a single site's criteria are wrong it only affects that site's recipients (and arguably the single site is more accountable for its actions). - when the reputation is based on something (like an address or address block) that isn't sufficiently fine-grained to reliably distinguish spam from ham, as compared to a site filter which has access to more criteria and can use the larger set of criteria to filter more accurately. Once again, the crucial issues seem to be transparency, accountability, granularity rather than the reputation reporting mechanism. Which is not to say that the mechanism doesn't also warrant improvement. Keith _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf