[76907] in North American Network Operators' Group
Proposed list charter/AUP change?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Nash)
Tue Jan 4 12:50:20 2005
Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2005 09:51:05 -0800 (PST)
From: Bill Nash <billn@billn.net>
To: Steve Sobol <sjsobol@JustThe.net>
Cc: Susan Harris <srh@merit.edu>, nanog@merit.edu,
Betty Burke <bburke@merit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <41D9F70F.4010801@JustThe.net>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
On Mon, 3 Jan 2005, Steve Sobol wrote:
> Susan keeps on claiming spam is offtopic for Nanog, yet the AUP/Charter/FAQ
> don't mention spam other than telling us not to ask "I'm being spammed, how
> can I make it stop?"
>
> If it's flat-out offtopic, no matter what, or if the majority of list members
> don't want to talk about it on the list, why hasn't the FAQ been updated? Or
> does Merit just want us to try to guess what is offtopic?
>
Spam represents a significant percentage of email traffic, and its
delivery is increasingly via trojaned dsl/broadband devices. Even spam
delivered from quasi-legitimate sources is usually an abuse of resources
that some NSP/ISP is paying for. Discussion of functional spam control at
the ISP level, I think, is absolutely on topic for a list of this scope.
Please note, that I say 'functional'. Random complaints would obviously
not fall into this category.
Examples would include:
Working enterprise-scale spam filtering (Hourly mail volume measured in
thousands)
Discussion of edge/core SMTP filtering to curtail spam sources.
Policy discussions for handling domestic and international spam sources.
Implementation, or requests for implementation, of SPF and similiar
controls.
Inter-network cooperation for handling large scale issues.
I think this last is pretty much exactly what a list like this is for, be
it spam, regional power outages, BGP shenanigans, or widespread squirrel
detonations.
- billn