Subject: List administration

From: Dean Anderson <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Dec 2003 19:47:12 -0500 (EST)

I was following this message from Nanog, in which Randy Bush is 
complaining about Verizon spam filtering.   What is alarming, is the 
change that Mr. Bush put into the PSG mail system, which also handles 
namedroppers email.

I think that if PSG does not have the resources to handle the mail for 
namedroppers without capriciously deleted mail, then it should be handed 
to someone else who does have the resources.

I would like to volunteer Av8 Internet as a more suitable and resourceful 
host for the namedroppers site.

I need not remind anyone of the past administration problems with Dan
Bernstein and others which have resulted in censure and administrative
changes to the administration of Namedroppers by PSG and Mr. Bush. These
problems have been repeated, and it seems that we are at the start of yet
another administration "problem".  It seems to me that no matter what we
do, we will never rid ourselves of a constant stream of administrative
problems if we keep the hosting the list at PSG.

By contrast, Av8 Internet has no political axe to grind over whose email
to send and whose to interfere with.  Av8 does not interfere with anyone's
email, nor will it ever capriciously delete anyone's email, nor will it
ever abuse its administrative privileges for personal harrassment.

Dean Anderson
CEO 
Av8 Internet, Inc

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 1 Dec 2003 11:10:16 -0800
From: Randy Bush <[email-masked]>
To: Jared Mauch <[email-masked]>
Cc: Suresh Ramasubramanian <[email-masked]>, [email-masked]
Subject: Re: incorrect spam setups cause spool messes on forwarders

> I think he's saying that they were unable to perform the
> validation hence the 450.  If the validation was successful,
> they'd return a 200 series code, if it was unsuccessful, they
> would return a 500 series code.

nice words, but crap.  due to needs to spool mail for sites in
countries with very poor connectivity, mail spool time here is
quite long.  if verizon and others seem unable to decide in weeks,
why should i pay the penalty?

but, i guess the problem is easily solved with exim config.  i have
set it so that if it can not deliver to verizon in say one hour, it
dumps the mail.

    verizon.net        *           F,1h,5m

life is simple, except for verizon users i guess.

randy

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---

From: Ólafur Gudmundsson/DNSEXT co-chair <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 03 Dec 2003 15:28:11 -0500

<chair>

>to someone else who does have the resources.

There is a big difference between having resources and publicly
intimidating a random ISP. Take your pick on what Randy was saying.

>host for the namedroppers site.

Noted, please send me and my co-chair more details on your setup,
for future reference.

>problems if we keep the hosting the list at PSG.

This is all ancient history, there have NO problems raised to my (or my
co-chairs) attention in many months.
On the other hand there has not been a single SPAM, showing up on the
list, and only few late postings from non subscribers. Overall the
mailing list operation has been excellent.

Rather than chastising Randy, we should be thanking him for a great job
he has been doing.

         Olafur

---

From: Dean Anderson <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2003 16:47:00 -0500 (EST)

> intimidating a random ISP. Take your pick on what Randy was saying.

He said he was altering the operations of his mail servers to delete mail
that wasn't delivered in one hour.  This is unreasonable, regardless of
what Verizon does.  Sometimes mailservers or internet connections are down
for short periods.  I doubt all of the namedroppers subscribers have
redundant connections, or even redundant mail servers. Those subscribers
require queuing and one hour is certainly unreasonable.  IETF lists should
not be used as "intimidation" for apparently personal gain.  I would say
that IETF email lists should not be toyed with by the administrator.

I don't know whether he made up the story.  But obviously, he noticed the
problem in the first place, so something brought it to his attention.  He
didn't say that Verizon customers were complaining to him that their mail
was slow.  He just said he didn't have the queue space to save the
messages for more than one hour.  I'd have to take him at his word.  
Especially when he says he has changed his mailserver configuration.

This "one hour" change was inappropriate, and I would like some
confirmation that this is no longer the case. I would also like to know
whether he made up the story and never made any changes, or if he has
backed out the changes.

And while I can't really criticize him for being ineffective at
intimidation, there are certainly better ways of publicly intimidating an
ISP than making threats involving operations of IETF lists.

The last DJB "scandal" was last January, and Randy stepped down from the
chair in June.

In the months where he does a good job, a good job was done.  I
congratulate him for that. But it seems that every once in while there is
something that detracts from this.

Namedroppers does seem remarkably free from spam, despite the fact that
spammers could simply forge subscriber's addresses and post.  I wonder if
perhaps spammers don't want to spam namedroppers anymore.  Or perhaps they
just wanted the list administration to change, and after having made their
point, don't care to spam the list anymore.  Whatever the case, I guess we
don't want to look a gift horse in the mouth.  They stopped. We're glad.  
If Randy made them stop, I congratulate him on that, too.

		--Dean

---

From: Greg Black <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 4 Dec 2003 12:35:07 +1000

On 2003-12-03, Dean Anderson wrote:
> what Verizon does.

Yes, it utterly unreasonable.  Things go wrong in the real
world:  power utilities have disasters; fires, floods and solar
flares cause problems; computer hardware loses its magic smoke.
Many people have stopped using backup MX hosts, as these just
seem to collect extra spam.

Because of all these factors, mailing lists should be prepared
to queue mail to subscribers for at least a few days.  If some
mailing list server is unwilling or unable to manage that, it
needs to hand over the job to a competent organisation.

Greg

---

From: Chris Thompson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 4 Dec 2003 14:01:28 +0000 (GMT)

<delurk>

> On 2003-12-03, Dean Anderson wrote:
[...]
> to queue mail to subscribers for at least a few days. 

Make that "mail servers in general" rather than just mailing lists,
and I have to agree, no argument. Locally the angels-on-a-pin contention 
has traditionally been whether 4 days or 5 days is the "right" timeout.

However, I can certainly sympathise with Randy about the highly
antisocial behaviour of servers that use 4xx codes unnecessarily to 
[not] reject suspected spam. We haven't heard his side of this yet, 
but often the right way to penalise such servers is not to shorten
the ultimate timeout, but to decrease the retry rate for transmission
attempts.

</delurk>

Chris Thompson
Email: [email-masked]

---

From: Jaap Akkerhuis <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 05 Dec 2003 10:02:24 +0100

Yes!

	jaap

---

From: "D. J. Bernstein" <[email-masked]>
Date: 7 Dec 2003 08:59:34 -0000

> Make that "mail servers in general" rather than just mailing lists,

Yup. RFC 1123 says ``the give-up time generally needs to be at least 4-5
days.'' RFC 2821 says the same thing.

I used a 7-day timeout in qmail, and I'm glad I did. A few months ago,
large chunks of the Internet were unreachable for several days straight;
naive 4-day timeouts led to widespread delivery failures.

Randy's 1-hour timeout is absurd.

---D. J. Bernstein, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics,
Statistics, and Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago