On 2022-04-17 at 23:20:26 UTC-0400 (Mon, 18 Apr 2022 05:20:26 +0200)
Paul Vixie via mailop <[email protected]>
is rumored to have said:

> Bill Cole via mailop wrote on 2022-04-17 22:56:
>> ...
>>
>> Reasonableness is case-specific Or "subjective" if you prefer...
>
> it is not.

I guess we'll have to set that aside, as we clearly do not agree on what those 
words means.

> no member of my circle of mailman subscribers who live inside the googplex 
> would consider google's opaque requirement that i renumber my mailserver 
> "reasonable". that's the definition which matters.

OK, so a hypothetical untested opinion of an unknown number of unidentified 
3rd-nth parties is not subjective. Not sure what it means to you, but we 
absolutely do not understand the word "subjective" in the same way. I'm sorry 
that I used it.

By your own account of events, you had an IP operating as a chronic public 
nuisance. You burned its reputation by not controlling what came from it. You 
had one that you could to switch to after fixing the underlying issue. Seems 
reasonable to me.

Should Google be better about noticing when problems go away? Maybe. Should IP 
addresses be made permanently useless for email because one well-intentioned 
sysadmin didn't recognize a problem for long enough that Google noticed? Maybe. 
It's not 1996, and arguably 'second chances' have not worked in the quarter 
century since. There's a utility in having heads on pikes. "Paul Vixie Ran 
Afoul OF Our Spam Control Policy!" has a particularly special 'head on pike' 
quality. My suspicion is that at some level, Google has decided to play the 
asshole rather than spending money on extremely specialized support staff to 
investigate cases and resolve them in gentle ways. I don't expect Brandon Long 
to weigh in on that facet of Google policy. (I wouldn't in his place...)

> they weren't consulted and won't be. google knows that the threshold for 
> nonattraction is mostly not related to the threshold for alienation. "we 
> don't care, we don't have to, we're the phone company" was not funny the 
> first time and isn't funny now.

No, it is not.

The comedic value of running mail systems has been on a steady decline. It's a 
problem.

>> If it is the *only* clearly working way forward, I'm not sure how that 
>> modifies or interacts with whether it is "reasonable." If you want to do 
>> something, you do it in a way that works, right?
>
> yikes.

One must understand whether the available means to a legitimate end are 
actually a moral failure or just unpleasant to perform. Nothing guarantees a 
solution to every problem, and especially not an ideal one.


-- 
Bill Cole
[email protected] or [email protected]
(AKA @grumpybozo and many *@billmail.scconsult.com addresses)
Not Currently Available For Hire
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