Subject: perspective

From: "James P. Salsman" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 22 May 2001 18:26:05 -0700 (PDT)

It took a few seconds to ignore the spurts of spam that started 
the recent mailing list policy threads, but I am now dozens of 
messages behind, trying to read and carefully consider all of 
the resulting insightful and witty comments.

What needs filtering, again?

Cheers,
James

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From: grant mcdonald <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 22 May 2001 22:59:50 -0700 (PDT)

what needs filtering is all this pointless commentary
on SPAM. i assure you all that somebody,
somewhere...probably several somebodies...are working
on the problem.
until then, do what i do: delete it
i get 250+ emails a day, and only about 5 of them are
spam. that tells me my filter works pretty good. if i
can suffer through the other 245, and not get worked
up about deleting the 5, then noone else should be
uptight about it either.

my next point is that today i recieved approx 35
emails from IETF members and list subscribers,
complaining about spam.

that's 30 MORE than the spam i got today.

so i'll ask the same question James did:
"what needs filtering?"

rgmc
AIM

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From: "Patricia A. Holden" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 08:31:03 -0400

thank you, my sentiments exactly!

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From: "Melinda Shore" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 09:17:50 -0400

>From: Patricia A. Holden <[email-masked]>
>To: grant mcdonald <[email-masked]>
>Cc: James P. Salsman <[email-masked]>; <[email-masked]>
>Sent: Wednesday, May 23, 2001 8:31 AM
>Subject: Re: perspective

> > on SPAM. 

I kinda don't get why all these people who are extolling
the virtues and values of mail filtering are complaining
about mailing list content.  Aren't you actually arguing 
against your own position by complaining?

I think discussion of policy and process has value, 
particularly if the IETF is going to continue to try to 
1) keep the process open and 2) do the bulk of its work
on mailing lists.

Melinda

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From: "Perry E. Metzger" <[email-masked]>
Date: 25 May 2001 00:18:17 -0400

> What needs filtering, again?

Congratulations. You are lucky. I literally am hit with HUNDREDS of
spam messages a day. Very aggressive filtering techniques mean that I
don't have to try looking at those manually, but it would literally
wreck my ability to find important email if I didn't stop the stuff.

Why do I get so much spam? Probably because I've had the same email
address for many years, post a lot, and many of my older addresses
still forward mail to me. (I have some evidence spammers have
addresses of mine that haven't been active since around the time
domain names first showed up in their lists, but luckily all those
addresses are long dead.) (I'm astonished that lots of spammers
apparently have even accidental misspellings of my email address in
their databases -- when I check my logs lots of [email-masked] and
[email-masked] stuff is there, almost certainly because of a
handful of bad crossposts to me sent to mailing lists over the years.)

To you, maybe, spam is ignorable and causes little damage. To some of
us, fighting it off is literally the difference between email
remaining a usable tool and having it become bogged down in what is
effectively denial of service. I could *not* delete the crap fast
enough by hand for "just hit delete, who cares" to be effective.

The "oh, who cares, just hit delete" crowd are, IMHO, terribly naive,
or personally lucky.

Perry

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From: "James P. Salsman" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 May 2001 21:43:54 -0700 (PDT)

> Congratulations. You are lucky....

I get plenty of spam, sometimes more than 20 per day, but seriously, 
it only takes me about 20 seconds to ignore it all.  

Sometimes when I see particularly obnoxious mail, I respond to it in 
a way that might prevent it in the future, but that usually doesn't 
take more than 20 minutes a day.  The real question is whether I have 
time to respond, and the amount of ordinary UCBE never really has 
much impact on that.  So it seems like luck has little to do with it.
However, I've made more than 500 posts to USENET in the past five 
years, mostly from this address, so maybe I am lucky.  My resume has 
been on the internet for about as long, so I guess so.

If I was lucky as an attribute and not as an accident, then I would 
certainly be able to get the W3C to abandon its secrecy regulations 
and instead respect its conflict of interest regulations.  If I was 
just moderatly lucky, it seems like at least a dozen speech technology 
research and development firms would have offered me work, but only 
a handful have.  Those are the kind of unsolicited offers that make 
people really happy, so when people start talking about taking away 
my ability to learn about work that needs to be done, it offends me.

Seriously, think about it.  If you were laid off from a major 
networking firm because you were working too hard to improve their 
market share, wouldn't you love to have access to questions that 
might lead you to a better job?  What if all the professional lists 
required people to pay before asking -- what would that do to your 
supply of information about leads?

Cheers,
James