Paul Hoffman wrote: > At 11:57 AM -0500 12/10/08, Theodore Tso wrote: >> The point I was trying to make is that there seems to be an inherent >> assumption by some people, perhaps because the people who make these >> assumptions run large mail servers, that the problem with someone who >> is wrongly blocked rests solely with the sender, and not with the >> utimate recipient, or with the mailer operator. > > "seems" ... "perhaps" ... > I know of no one on this list who makes those assumptions. In my > discussions with people who "run large mail servers", none of them have > made that assumption. My experiences are similar to Ted's. They may not realize that they're making such assumptions. But such assumptions are implicit in the notion that the sender should jump through some additional hoop in order to get his name off of a blacklist or to get his mail accepted. (One hoop that I was recently asked to jump through was to change the PTR record for the source address of my outgoing mail server so that it contained a label of the form "mail" or "mx#".) The emphaiss on operators of "large mail servers" may be missing the point. A significant amount of mail is not sent via "large mail servers". And I don't think that many of us want effective email to be limited to "large mail servers". And maybe there are some good guys out there who don't expect senders (or their mail systems) to jump through arbitrary hoops in order to get mail through. But unless there are clear and effective guidelines for what all operators should do regarding spam (and most operators follow them), mail will continue to be unreliable. Simply saying "use a trustworthy blacklist" is not sufficient - it's just deferring the problem to a third party with even less accountability to the endpoints and less transparency. Keith _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf