Re: Every spam is sacred
On Sun, Jun 15, 2003 at 10:11:22PM -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> > Given that it's been pointed out that the MTA supports per-user bouncing
> > of mail from open relays, and that it's very possible to use LDAP to
> > provide easy management of per-user preferences, why is there any need
> > to continue discussing what individual developers do or don't consider
> > acceptable for collateral damage?
>
> I don't think it's as simple as that. When I worked for VA Linux
> systems, we consciously decided not to use any spam-blocking systems,
> and live with the spam, because the chance that we might lose one
> e-mail from a customer due to a false-positive was considered
> unacceptable.
>
> If some number of Debian developers utilizing blocking that has a
> false positive rate of as high as 2 per day by some estimates, do we
> as a body consider it acceptable if some percentage of Debian
> developers:
Frankly, we as a body cannot possibly have a real say in this particular
issue. Every developer can filter their mail for themselves -- and a lot of
them already do (probably a vast majority). Even people who don't filter
mail in a technical manner can perfectly well ignore mails for whatever
reason. It's practically impossible to not leave this in the discretion of
individual developers.
Besides, mails get lost all the time, for a variety of reasons most of
which are out of our control. The impact is never any more than negligible,
otherwise there'd be much more fuss raised about it.
> but the debian mail system is run by the entire Debian project, and so
> it is appropriate that the decision be one which is taken by the
> entire project about whether or not supporting a service which has
> such a high potential false positive rate is something the Debian
> project as a whole should support.
Now that's just silly. People are already allowed to use a myriad of
filtering methods on Debian systems, none of which are intrinsically worse
or better than those that aren't available systemwide (dnsbl, spamassassin,
razor, ...). And if the method isn't available systemwide, they can run it
from their home directory.
Having stuff run in a more technically sane way (like by not having everyone
maintain a duplicate copy of whatever software necessary in their $HOME, or
having hundreds or thousands of DNS lookups get made per mail instead of
just a few) is certainly something that any sysadmin would prefer.
I'm getting tired of these red herrings. I guess it serves Santiago right --
he posted the issue on -devel in a flamebait-ish way and all he (and we) got
was this useless flamewar.
--
2. That which causes joy or happiness.
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