Subject: please move the spam discussion elsewhere

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 13:29:30 -0400

It's not that spam isn't an important problem, nor that it's entirely
out of scope for IETF.   But the lack of agreement on the nature of the
problem, along with the level of naivete in these discussions, suggest
that it will be a long time before these discussions can hope to bear
useful fruit.  And this isn't a particularly effective venue to work
on that problem.

If nothing else, the NSRG antispam research group has been talking about
this for several months, and there's no point in repeating the same
arguments on the IETF list that they've been having over there.

see https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg

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From: "Anthony Atkielski" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 20:16:48 +0200

Right now, there is probably no other greater problem with the Internet than
spam.  That sounds more than important enough to justify discussion here.
You can delete any messages that mention spam, if you want.

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From: grenville armitage <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 05:32:34 +1000

Anthony Atkielski wrote:
> spam.

It certainly has been a problem for this list over the past few days,
that's for sure.

gja

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From: Peter Deutsch <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 13:09:07 -0700

g'day,

Hopefully, I can eventually control my fascination with this particular
blinking light and stop feeding this particular troll. Meanwhile, I do
feel that this particular consciousness-raising effort has value for the
members of this list, since as Paul Vixie has pointed out it may be time
to revisit the group's earlier decision to avoid tackling the problem.

So here I go again, picking up points from multiple postings:

> You can delete any messages that mention spam, if you want.

To our credit, everyone involved in this thread (until this mutation
appeared) seem to have properly appended the appropriate "Subject Re:
spam", making automatic SPAM filtering trivially easy..... ;-)

and:

> What's your point?
> 
> Sysadmins are supposed to be past the learning curve already.

At the risk of repeating myself, economists will tell you that it is at
margin that "marginal costs" are calculated. Those who would keep
repeating the mantra that email "costs only $1 or $2 a month" are IMHO
entirely missing the point.

Sure, these poor deluded folks should just abandon any attempt at
operating a school network or providing their community with anything
but barebones commercial services, but they chose to push the envelope a
bit, using donated equipment, part time staff and volunteers to stretch
the budget. There are a lot of folks at the periphery who are living
this story, whether in the developing world, or in non-commercial
settings. Shame of those who would consume their precious resources or
divert their attention from other, more worthy activities.

The guy helping to hold it all together in this example (and I used it
only as an illustrative example) is actually pretty good at teaching
primary school kids basic computer skills, and can certainly deliver
basic services such as a functioning file server with his extra time,
but he's ill-equipped to handle mailstorms, Denial of Service attacks or
other infrastructure problems. The system relies on folks like me for
escalation support, and it usually works fine. That's why I get so
irritated when folks like you try to minimize the costs of spam in this
thread. It really shouldn't be your call to tell them that they're
playing out of their league.

In this case, the guy called me in to investigate a sluggish,
non-responsive Window NT file server that we discovered was being
bombarded by repeated email connections from overseas, since it had
somehow got onto some spammers' list of relay hosts. Note, this was a
system he inherited, and it's not primarily a mail host, so "go sign up
for a $1 email account" really doesn't solve the underlying problem
here. After all, we all get stuck with legacy systems support at some
point, non?

In this case, we closed it up and did what we could to fix the
overflowing disk problems, etc, but the connection requests continue. So
your answer to the school would appear to be to shut it all down down,
or fire the computer teacher because he can't solve this problem on his
own? That's just silly...

and:

> > usually it takes a week, but you did it all in
> > 36 hours.  congrats?
> 
> I'm afraid I don't understand.

Here I'm going to agree with you. I do this consciously, and with the
expectation that this thread is starting on its death spiral. Can
somebody please make a reference to Adolf Hitler, so we can all declare
victory and go home?

			- peterd (queue the Monthy Python SPAM song...)

-- 
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   Peter Deutsch                   [email-masked]
   Gydig Software

      "Don't get me wrong: Emacs is a great operating system -
       it lacks a good editor, though."

					- Thomer M. Gil
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