[e2e] latest spate of cruft postings to e2e

[David G. Andersen]

On Thu, Nov 06, 2003 at 09:42:23PM +0000, Joe Touch quacked:
> 
> White lists assume that all white-listed senders make the same
> decision on what is spam that you do. This is a known failure of that
> assumption.
> 
> Users are free to use whatever filters they prefer, however the
> configuration of this list is not (and cannot be) optimized for all
> receiver's configurations. 

  I sent this privately, but since the discussion appears to
be continuing, I'll repeat a bit of it to the list.

  This is somewhat misleading.  The list maintainer is in
the perfect position to do whitelisting, and the list subscribers
are in no position to do whitelisting.  As the list maintainer,
you know quite well 99% of the people who are both authorized
and likely to post to the list.  As subscribers, we don't have
the subscription list (and don't want it).

  Furthermore, spam filtering post-list is very ineffective
compared to pre-list.  Once the spam reaches the e2e mailing
list, it's likely to get through most of our filters because
we're restricted to looking at content at that point.  The
list gets to look at the sender IP, the real received
headers, etc., etc.

  It's becoming quite clear that the onus of spam filtering
is and should be on the maintainer of the list, and that we,
your subscribers, have placed our trust in you to do that
filtering as well as possible, using all of the tools you have
at hand to accomplish it.

  Since legitimate mail is already periodically sent to the
list maintainer, the occasional additional non-subscriber post
shouldn't add much to that burden.  As Perry noted, this
problem has been very well-studied by maintainers of other
mailing lists, and subscriber-based posting restrictions
are one of the best solutions.

  -Dave

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