--On Monday, May 07, 2012 14:18 +0000 John Levine
<johnl@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>> the question seems to be "we used to reply to the sender
>>> with a notification that their message was blocked due to
>>> not being a list member, with options to wait or cancel; did
>>> we disable those notifications?"
>
> I sure hope so. These days about 99.9% of spam from unknown
> senders is spam with forged addresses, so responses are just
> more spam aka blowback.
At the same time, the IETF has considerable obligations about
openness. From that point of view, silently discarding messages
from someone who thought they had properly subscribed could be
rather bad news. Fortunately, if I correctly understand the
thread, we aren't doing that, we are moderating instead.
If that is correct, it seems to me that it might be appropriate
to send a message to the submitter of a moderated message
explaining that moderation leads to both delays and extra work
so that, if they intend to submit further messages from the
address, they should subscribe properly. That approach would
seem to serve both efficiency (fewer messages to moderate
because people would be warned to subscribe) and anti-blowback
efforts (the only messages that would generate responses to a
supposed submission addresses are those that had already been
found sufficiently valid/relevant to post to the list).
It also seems to me that our subscription and archive pages
might well be modified to be explicit about what our procedures
actually are. Doing so would improve openness, help some
contributors, and not help any spammers who are indifferent to
whether their messages go (anyone wanting to specifically spam
IETF lists can figure out how to subscribe, even with our
verification process).
If an active contributor like Hector is posting one message
after another, seeing delays, and not noticing that he is not
properly subscribed at that address, it seems to me that we
could, and should, be doing better rather than blaming the
victim.
john