> Schemes that attempt to assess the desirability of the email > to the recipient have been tried - personal whitelists, > personal Bayesian filters, etc. etc. In practice they haven't > worked all that well, perhaps due to the average user's > inability to capably and consistently perform such assessments. You are talking about the operational imperative. In ops you have to work with what you have and make the best of things. > Well, sure. When you have a million users it's not only > difficult to focus on an individual user's needs, it's also > totally inappropriate. In ops, yes. But in design its the other way around. The needs of a single user form a use-case which guides the designers. In this forum there are some who believe that the Internet email architecture can be reformed so that it does not have the same weakenesses which allow the flood of spam to produce a positive statistical result for the spammers. DNSBLs may be needed today in email operations, but if the IETF steps up and does the work to fix the root of the problem, perhaps they won't be needed at all in the future. > And from what I've seen most of the ones I deal with - these > folks are our main customers - take those responsibilities > extremely seriously, if for no other reason than large > numbers of complaints are very costly to deal with and will > end up getting them fired. Again you are talking about email operations which is dealt with very well by MAAWG. > It provoked a strong reaction from me because it both > reminded me of the appallingly low quality of the previous > discourse and seemed like an indication of the resumption of > same. And I simply couldn't take another round of it. So how do you and Ted reach consensus? What is it that you and he have failed to understand which causes you to have such emotionally opposite reactions? I suspect that you are thinking like an email operator who has the position that you can't change what is being thrown at you so you just have to deal with it and live with the damage. And Ted is thinking like a user who wishes that Internet email would just work, like his TV and his web browser. Neither of you are wrong. --Michael Dillon _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf