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[Eric A. Hall]

Joe Touch wrote:

> We decided against limiting posts to 'members only' because of the
> complexity incurred by users with multiple accounts (subscribe from
> Y would mean submissions must be sent only from Y

There is ample evidence that spam on mailing lists is easily muted without
imposing significant costs on anybody, but that allowing it to continue
introduces ongoing costs to all parties.

Consider, for example, that it is a *one-time* cost for me to setup a
read-|post-only account or script. Several exploders allow for multiple
accounts, some of which may or may not get mail, meaning that you can have
multiple posting accounts or multiple reading accounts, or whatever
cross-hatch pattern of that. Also, a significant part of that problem goes
away when readers have predictable mechanisms for forwarding or munging
mails (the To or CC header fields already provide adequatel mechanisms for
selective munging in outgoing mails, please consider the use of List-ID
[RFC2919] for incoming mails).

On the other hand, gingerly walking around spam from "trusted" relays is
an ongoing cost: you and I both have to be careful with rejects that don't
result in me getting unsubscribed from the list. I end up having to take
all of the spam from you and processing it off-line, generating
undeliverable notification messages, and so forth.

Please, the one-time cost is much more preferable.

-- 
Eric A. Hall                                        http://www.ehsco.com/
Internet Core Protocols          http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/