Re: Ian Jackson, please get me the hell off your blacklist.
Branden Robinson writes (Re: Ian Jackson, please get me the hell off your blacklist.): I see no reason not to reply [...] I think you are being hypocritical. You complain when other people post their opinions and discussions of this topic with you, yet you post your own diatribes here. Since your request to keep the discussion to private email seems insincere I shall answer you here. Also, I object to your misleading characterisations of my position and highly tendentious phrasings in your complaints. They are not helpful for constructive debate and I respectfully suggest that you tone it down. As I said in private email, I understand that you're angry, but please stop acting out. There are two issues here. One is the general question about mail handling, spam blocking, etc. The other is the specific issue with respect to your complaint about my mail system. On the general question: I think it's completely unhelpful when people on both sides of this argument start to talk about how it's their `right' to send mail freely in any way they like and have it accepted, or their `right' to block mail in any way they choose. I don't want to get into the existence or otherwise of these `rights' for communications on the net in general. That's just asking for an enormous and pointless flamewar. However, it's clear that for us to work successfully together we must be able to communicate. Every pair of developers might need to talk to each other. It's therefore not OK if due to people's exercise of these `rights' they can't communicate. This obviously means that developers have to have at least some shared ideas of what can be expected from the sending and receiving ends of a mail transfer. The problem is caused by the existence of spam, because it means that there are people who are trying to send mail to us whose mail we definitely want to exclude - and these exclusions are essentially political rather than technical and sometimes have false positives or mean that certain kinds of apparently harmless behaviour end up forbidden. This leads to the kinds of heated debates we've seen here. The upshot is that there will have to be some agreement about what is and is not acceptable, both as behaviour on the part of the sender, or as policy on the part of the recipient. There will have to be some minimum standards (even if they're not written down) which everyone agrees to abide by. It seems obvious to me that we should try to balance the negative effects of spam (and other kinds of abusive or broken mail) and the inconvenience of people having to change mail configuration or whatever to make the mail get through. We can't take this whole issue as a lump and say I HAVE MY RIGHT TO DO WHATEVER I WANT AND FUCK YOU YOU'RE ALL A BUNCH OF ARSEHOLES. Instead, we should argue each issue on merits in a constructive way, in terms of its costs, benefits etc. Several kinds of these issues have been raised: MAPS RBL, MAPS RSS, ORBS, DUL (and the like), and various similar things. I think we should take them each individually. It seems to me that the case for the MAPS RBL and the MAPS RSS are pretty well established; they have very low false positive rates, and are generally careful about who they include. With the RBL, of course, you could even say that it's unethical to financially support a spam-haven ISP. It's true that being (or mailing via) an open relay - the criterion for RSS - is not necessarily evil in itself, but it makes it very hard to distinguish legitimate from spam mail, and in general we are all I think agreed that in today's Internet open relays are a problem which needs to be removed. With respect to the ORBS: I respect what they're trying to do, but it seems to me that they're too quick to list entire networks because they allegedly blocked the automatic tester, and too slow to remove them. This means that a sender can effectively end up with no good solution, merely because someone on a neighbouring IP address once blocked the ORBS tester. I won't go into the DUL here, because that's a very contentious issue and would be too much to talk about in this one message. I'll send another message with my view on the DUL. On the specific issue: Branden's complaint is about the fact that for the first three hours after seeing a particular IP address (or for the first hour after seeing a new envelope sender), my MTA will not accept mail from it. Instead it sends a `450' response to RCPT; this is a temporary failure code which indicates to the sending end that it should try later. Before I go into the details, I would like to point out to anyone else who is reading this thread that Branden did not receive a bounce. Indeed, this strategy by my MTA is invisible to the sender of the mail, though of course it can be visible to their system administrator in logfiles and mail queues. Branden discovered this SMTP interaction by looking at his sendmail logs (NB, not due to an error report
Re: Ian Jackson, please get me the hell off your blacklist.
On Mon, Apr 03, 2000 at 12:56:11AM +0100, Ian Jackson wrote: I think you are being hypocritical. You complain when other people post their opinions and discussions of this topic with you, yet you post your own diatribes here. Since your request to keep the discussion to private email seems insincere I shall answer you here. I've explained why I posted the first message in this thread -- I wasn't sure I could successfully send mail to your machine. Since then, I have merely followed up other people's remarks, if I felt they misunderstood my position. It is you who felt compelled to CC our argument to the submitter of every bug I closed, an act I consider more intrusive than CC'ing a mailing list. The people who submitted those bugs needed to know why I closed them. They did not particularly need to hear you lecture me about your mail system. Also, I object to your misleading characterisations of my position and I don't recall that I have done so; please cite a reference. highly tendentious phrasings in your complaints. They are not helpful Perhaps tendentious bears a connotation of which I am not aware, but I do not see how making remarks that are consistent with my perspective are particularly problematic. for constructive debate and I respectfully suggest that you tone it down. As I said in private email, I understand that you're angry, but please stop acting out. I'm less angry about SAUCE being sassy with my mail now then I was before, but since you continue to resort to logical fallacies to proclaim the value of the DUL, I can't say that I'm distinctly less upset. To wit: Paul Vixie approves of the DUL is not a valid reason for adopting it. Last I checked, Paul Vixie handled the MAPS project generally but delegated management of DUL to Gordon Fecyk (IIRC). We can presume that Paul Vixie approves of DUL on principle, but because someone may be an expert in cron and name service doesn't necessarily translate to a similar level of expertise in good mail transport practice. Lots of other people use DUL is not a valid reason for adopting it, unless DUL's value is derived *solely* from the fact that other people uses, and thus promotes interoperability. In fact, DUL is designed to reduce spam, not to be popular, and it actually has detrimental effects on some hosts that follow various RFC's regarding SMTP connections. Statistics show that DUL generates few false positives is not a valid reason for adopting it unless these statistics are available for analysis and critique, and we know that the data were gathered under well-controlled conditions. Jason Gunthorpe's statistics for the Debian mailing lists -- while I don't know how well they were controlled -- seemed to indicate that the number of false positives was indeed signifcant. So it is possible to make statistical conclusions that cut both ways with respect to the efficacy of DUL -- and that means that we either need better statistics, or must abandon quantitative analysis as a means of determining the value of DUL. For an explanation of why the above are invalid logical arguments, I refer the reader to any introductory level book on rhetoric or critical thinking. The problem is caused by the existence of spam, because it means that there are people who are trying to send mail to us whose mail we definitely want to exclude - and these exclusions are essentially political rather than technical and sometimes have false positives or mean that certain kinds of apparently harmless behaviour end up forbidden. This leads to the kinds of heated debates we've seen here. I don't understand why you feel the need to qualify harmless with apparently. Is it your position that the sending of non-spam mail from a dialup host is in fact harmful? If so, please support that position with an argument that doesn't refer to DUL (to do so would be circular reasoning). It seems obvious to me that we should try to balance the negative effects of spam (and other kinds of abusive or broken mail) and the inconvenience of people having to change mail configuration or whatever to make the mail get through. To achieve a balance acceptable to the corpus of the project is likely going to require some kind of democratic approach, and involve compromise. I have seen no evidence that DUL advocates are willing to compromise. There might not be much in the way of middle ground to reach on this issue; there are people who believe it is acceptable to deliberately impede the transmission of e-mail that isn't spam, and there are those who don't. It is well and good for each person to make this decision for his or her own mailbox -- but blacklists are typically configured at the MTA level, which means that people can unwittingly become subject to blacklists that they wouldn't otherwise employ. Instead, we should argue each issue on merits in a constructive way, in terms of its costs, benefits etc. Keep in mind that bounced non-spam mails
Re: Ian Jackson, please get me the hell off your blacklist.
On Sat, 1 Apr 2000, Craig Sanders wrote: On Fri, Mar 31, 2000 at 11:08:53PM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote: On Fri, Mar 31, 2000 at 11:18:47PM +1000, Craig Sanders wrote: your right to free speech does not include the right to force anyone else to listen. Then this principle must apply universally. I reserve the right to ignore bug reports for any reason I choose, then. of course you have that right. any volunteer always has the right to abandon the responsibilities that they have freely chosen to accept. I believe the discussion is about speech, not volunteer responsibilities. Speech implies a listener, otherwise we would never have discussions about trees falling in the forest unobserved. Speech without a listener is failed communication. That is exactly what we are seeing here. No single party to the conversation can fix the problem. Both parties must participate in the communication of ideas or there can be no exchange. Both parties getting to have their say, and everything continuing as before, is not communication. Freedom is a wonderful concept, until it is used to bludgeon someone else into doing things your way, against their own better judgement. Luck, Dwarf -- _-_-_-_-_- Author of The Debian Linux User's Guide _-_-_-_-_-_- aka Dale Scheetz Phone: 1 (850) 656-9769 Flexible Software 11000 McCrackin Road e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tallahassee, FL 32308 _-_-_-_-_-_- See www.linuxpress.com for more details _-_-_-_-_-_-_-
Re: Ian Jackson, please get me the hell off your blacklist.
On Fri, Mar 31, 2000 at 09:53:06AM -0600, John Goerzen wrote: Your complaint against us using the DUL is valid. It should not be used. Your complaint against IWJ is not, and your complain/threat against Debian even less so since we are not doing that. I'm making no threat. I reserve the right to depart the project if I am overcome with disgust. As volunteers, we all have that right. He has the right to filter his incoming mail as he sees fit. Then I *must* have a corresponding right to refuse to do project business with people who refuse to carry on a two-way conversation with me, (or with my machine, via standard Internet protocols). Sending me mails -- with whatever content -- and discarding my replies regardless of their content is nothing short of harassment. That I may be able to jump through some arbitrary set of hoops to satisfy the senders does not change this in the least. No one has yet been able to point me to an RFC that describes my usage of my MTA as deprecated or forbidden. Since I cannot communicate with bug report filers from chiark.greenend.org.uk, all bug reports submitted, past, present, or future, by people from that host will be summarily closed. That message was not indicitave of a delivery failure. No, but it was aggravating. My host was being viewed with suspicion for daring to be unfamiliar. I don't know how that could possibly happen, given the small number of hosts on the net. But I digress. I reiterate, iwj and I are discussing this in private mail. I see no need at present to clutter the lists with it. Whether I was right or wrong to send mail to -devel decrying the action, it is even less appropriate for you to dredge the issue up again after I've taken it to private mail. If a subject is off-topic, please don't apply a defibrillator to it after the participants have moved on. -- G. Branden Robinson|It was a typical net.exercise -- a Debian GNU/Linux |screaming mob pounding on a greasy spot [EMAIL PROTECTED] |on the pavement, where used to lie the roger.ecn.purdue.edu/~branden/ |carcass of a dead horse. pgpCBuOGDV2VA.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Ian Jackson, please get me the hell off your blacklist.
On Fri, Mar 31, 2000 at 11:18:47PM +1000, Craig Sanders wrote: your right to free speech does not include the right to force anyone else to listen. Then this principle must apply universally. I reserve the right to ignore bug reports for any reason I choose, then. -- G. Branden Robinson|Suffer before God and ye shall be Debian GNU/Linux |redeemed. God loves us, so He makes us [EMAIL PROTECTED] |suffer Christianity. roger.ecn.purdue.edu/~branden/ |-- Aaron Dunsmore pgp6saAj3lEuW.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Ian Jackson, please get me the hell off your blacklist.
On Fri, Mar 31, 2000 at 03:00:35PM +0100, Diana Galletly wrote: Yes, sure we could get other addresses that don't use SAUCE, but some of them might use DUL or some such, and then Joseph would be ranting ... Well, everything has consequences. Sysadmins have the right to employ DUL. People on dynamic IP's have no right to be heard. People on dynamic IP's might not be heard. People on dyanmic IP's have the right to refuse mails from DUL-employing sites, knowing their mails will be rejected. People who employ DUL have no right to be heard. People who employ DUL might no be heard. This applies just as well to SAUCE and people SAUCE doesn't like. Sure, everyone has the right to throw away mails from me for any reason they choose, at any stage of the delivery process. Just keep in mind, I have the same right. And I might start employing it. Who am I to tell you who you can't blacklist? Who are you to tell me the same? Furthermore, this Project has no business countenancing any particular SMTP blacklist policy over any other -- because no one has the right to be heard. -- G. Branden Robinson|If you wish to strive for peace of soul, Debian GNU/Linux |then believe; if you wish to be a [EMAIL PROTECTED] |devotee of truth, then inquire. roger.ecn.purdue.edu/~branden/ |-- Friedrich Nietzsche pgpAP83TYJrB0.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Ian Jackson, please get me the hell off your blacklist.
On Fri, Mar 31, 2000 at 11:08:53PM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote: On Fri, Mar 31, 2000 at 11:18:47PM +1000, Craig Sanders wrote: your right to free speech does not include the right to force anyone else to listen. Then this principle must apply universally. I reserve the right to ignore bug reports for any reason I choose, then. of course you have that right. any volunteer always has the right to abandon the responsibilities that they have freely chosen to accept. craig -- craig sanders
Re: Ian Jackson, please get me the hell off your blacklist.
On Sat, Apr 01, 2000 at 03:11:27PM +1000, Craig Sanders wrote: On Fri, Mar 31, 2000 at 11:08:53PM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote: On Fri, Mar 31, 2000 at 11:18:47PM +1000, Craig Sanders wrote: your right to free speech does not include the right to force anyone else to listen. Then this principle must apply universally. I reserve the right to ignore bug reports for any reason I choose, then. of course you have that right. any volunteer always has the right to abandon the responsibilities that they have freely chosen to accept. Then that is what you do every time you reject an incoming mail message having to do with project business. It doesn't matter how or why the messages get ignored; deliberately or not, individually reviewed messages or not, refusing these mail messages is an abdication of your responsibilities. Thanks for clearing this up for me. -- G. Branden Robinson| Debian GNU/Linux |If encryption is outlawed, only outlaws [EMAIL PROTECTED] |will @goH7OjBd7*dnfk=q4fDj]Kz?. roger.ecn.purdue.edu/~branden/ | pgpEcc1rcFRO1.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Ian Jackson, please get me the hell off your blacklist.
On Sat, Apr 01, 2000 at 02:09:45AM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote: Then that is what you do every time you reject an incoming mail message having to do with project business. you know, you have a point there - if i wanted to redefine reality into some bizarre idiosyncratic perception of it then i could agree with you. Thanks for clearing this up for me. you're welcome. you be sure to have a nice day now. craig -- craig sanders
Re: Ian Jackson, please get me the hell off your blacklist.
Branden Robinson writes (Re: Ian Jackson, please get me the hell off your blacklist.): Sending me mails -- with whatever content -- and discarding my replies regardless of their content is nothing short of harassment. [further polemic] I reiterate, iwj and I are discussing this in private mail. I see no need at present to clutter the lists with it. [further complaint about off-topicness] If you really want the topic only to continue in email I suggest that you abide by that yourself ! If you continue to post these kinds of heated messages on -devel you can hardly complain when people respond. Note that, obviously, I disagree with Branden's characterisations of what I and my MTA are doing, and with his complaints. I'd be happy to discuss it either in public or in private. Currently Branden says he wants to discuss it in private - fine, but then he should do so. In the meantime I won't go into the arguments here. Ian.
Re: Ian Jackson, please get me the hell off your blacklist.
On Sat, Apr 01, 2000 at 03:20:00PM +0100, Ian Jackson wrote: If you really want the topic only to continue in email I suggest that you abide by that yourself ! If you continue to post these kinds of heated messages on -devel you can hardly complain when people respond. It's a matter of degrees. You and I know how long the messages are that we've exchanged about SAUCE over the past couple of days. I see no reason not to reply when people imply to me that I should thank my lucky stars that people don't have me on an anti-spam blacklist, despite the fact that zero spams have ever come from my machine. One group of antispammers says that SMTP'ing from a dynamically assigned IP should be verboten, and enforce their opinion by bouncing or dropping all such mails. You have told me that you think I shouldn't be SMTP'ing from my own machine *even though* my IP is statically assigned! I resent these paternalistic attitudes and multiplicity of standards. They do absolutely nothing to promote the reliability of the net. We have standards for a reason. In the hysterical rampage against the obnoxious twits who send spam, we're flushing the reliability of email down the toilet. Individual users must twist themselves into one pretzel to satisfy the DUL, another to satisfy ORBS (where you can be blacklisted by association, not for doing anything wrong on your own box), a third to satisfy SAUCE (where the concept of blacklisting has been turned on its head and you must qualify for a whitelist before it deigns to listen to you). I'm sure the list will continue to grow as certain individuals find the measures of all of the above insufficient. -- G. Branden Robinson| Psychology is really biology. Debian GNU/Linux | Biology is really chemistry. [EMAIL PROTECTED] | Chemistry is really physics. roger.ecn.purdue.edu/~branden/ | Physics is really math. pgpsweWIFXiv2.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Ian Jackson, please get me the hell off your blacklist.
On Thu, Mar 30, 2000 at 11:32:49AM +0100, Stephen Early wrote: All of the recent discussion about various blacklists, dial-up user lists, etc. seems to have frayed people's tempers. I see a lot of messages from angry people, with little useful content. I suggest everyone takes a step back and thinks before sending further mail: do you really want to waste time arguing about this, and flying off the handle for no good reason? I'm fighting with iwj about this in private mail, and won't trouble the lists further about it at this time. I do have a better idea of what's going on now, but I still feel his MTA is presuming my box guilty of spam generation without good reason (that is the avowed purpose of SAUCE, and there's no other reason to reject mail with a valid envelope and headers when there aren't system problems like a full spool filesystem). And yes, you could consider my temper frayed on this subject. -- G. Branden Robinson| Debian GNU/Linux | The software said it required Windows [EMAIL PROTECTED] | 3.1 or better, so I installed Linux. roger.ecn.purdue.edu/~branden/ | pgp5V28GG3R4G.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Ian Jackson, please get me the hell off your blacklist.
On Fri, Mar 31, 2000 at 03:43:27AM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote: I'm fighting with iwj about this in private mail, and won't trouble the lists further about it at this time. I do have a better idea of what's going on now, but I still feel his MTA is presuming my box guilty of spam generation without good reason (that is the avowed purpose of SAUCE, and there's no other reason to reject mail with a valid envelope and headers when there aren't system problems like a full spool filesystem). And yes, you could consider my temper frayed on this subject. why? it's his mail server, he can do what he likes with it. he is entitled to reject or defer mail delivery to his system for any reason he chooses, regardless of whether you happen to approve or not. he can run whatever insane spam filtering software he likes (and yes, i do happen to think that SAUCE is insane, but my opinion - like yours - is irrelevant because it's his mail server, not yours or mine). on your machines, your policy applies. on his machines, his policy. simple. your right to free speech does not include the right to force anyone else to listen. craig -- craig sanders
Re: Ian Jackson, please get me the hell off your blacklist.
On Fri, Mar 31, 2000 at 11:18:47PM +1000, Craig Sanders wrote: On Fri, Mar 31, 2000 at 03:43:27AM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote: why? it's his mail server, he can do what he likes with it. he is entitled to reject or defer mail delivery to his system for any reason he chooses, regardless of whether you happen to approve or not. he can run whatever insane spam filtering software he likes (and yes, i do happen to think that SAUCE is insane, but my opinion - like yours - is irrelevant because it's his mail server, not yours or mine). on your machines, your policy applies. on his machines, his policy. simple. your right to free speech does not include the right to force anyone else to listen. I think Branden's whole point was that he doesn't like to be forced to listen to something he's not able to respond to (to Ian's bug report, that is) and that therefore he will just do this: not listen to Ian's bug reports. So I think your argument doesn't work well here. Gregor
Re: Ian Jackson, please get me the hell off your blacklist.
On Fri, 31 Mar 2000, Gregor Hoffleit wrote: On Fri, Mar 31, 2000 at 11:18:47PM +1000, Craig Sanders wrote: your right to free speech does not include the right to force anyone else to listen. I think Branden's whole point was that he doesn't like to be forced to listen to something he's not able to respond to (to Ian's bug report, that is) and that therefore he will just do this: not listen to Ian's bug reports. So I think your argument doesn't work well here. But a) he _was_ able to respond to it, the message just got delayed by three hours; and b) the bug report was from one of Ian's users, not Ian, and the drastic action would affect several of Ian's users, not just Ian. Yes, sure we could get other addresses that don't use SAUCE, but some of them might use DUL or some such, and then Joseph would be ranting ... (btw, Joseph, you and the rest of pacbell.net should be able to send mail to eng.cam.ac.uk addresses these days ...) Diana. -- + Diana Galletly [EMAIL PROTECTED] + + http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~galletly/ +
Re: Ian Jackson, please get me the hell off your blacklist.
Branden Robinson [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: If you don't correct this at once I will be forced to re-evaluate my place within a project that is nominally devoted to free and open communication among its members and the rest of the world. Your complaint against us using the DUL is valid. It should not be used. Your complaint against IWJ is not, and your complain/threat against Debian even less so since we are not doing that. He has the right to filter his incoming mail as he sees fit. Since I cannot communicate with bug report filers from chiark.greenend.org.uk, all bug reports submitted, past, present, or future, by people from that host will be summarily closed. That message was not indicitave of a delivery failure.
Re: Ian Jackson, please get me the hell off your blacklist.
On Wed, 29 Mar 2000, Branden Robinson wrote: Mar 29 15:20:15 apocalypse sendmail[7886]: e2T8qEi03048: [EMAIL PROTECTED] .greenend.org.uk, ctladdr=branden (1000/1000), delay=11:28:01, xdelay =00:00:21, mailer=esmtp, pri=6332789, relay=chiark.greenend.org.uk. [195.224.76.132], dsn=4.2.0, stat=Deferred: 450 Site not yet trusted, try later [Irritated] Maybe you'd care to explain to me what's not trusted about my site? See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~ian/sauce/. Note that the response from chiark said 450 Site not yet trusted, try later. First of all, note that it's a temporary failure (450) and your MTA should retry automatically. Also the text says not yet and try later, both of which suggest that the message will be accepted at some point in the future. Irritated? *YOU'RE* irritated? If you don't correct this at once I will be forced to re-evaluate my place within a project that is nominally devoted to free and open communication among its members and the rest of the world. All of the recent discussion about various blacklists, dial-up user lists, etc. seems to have frayed people's tempers. I see a lot of messages from angry people, with little useful content. I suggest everyone takes a step back and thinks before sending further mail: do you really want to waste time arguing about this, and flying off the handle for no good reason? Steve Early
Re: Ian Jackson, please get me the hell off your blacklist.
Branden Robinson writes (Ian Jackson, please get me the hell off your blacklist.): Mar 29 15:20:15 apocalypse sendmail[7886]: e2T8qEi03048: [EMAIL PROTECTED], ctladdr=branden (1000/1000), delay=11:28:01, xdelay=00:00:21, mailer=esmtp, pri=6332789, relay=chiark.greenend.org.uk. [195.224.76.132], dsn=4.2.0, stat=Deferred: 450 Site not yet trusted, try later [Irritated] Maybe you'd care to explain to me what's not trusted about my site? My site has only just met yours. Specifically, my system will defer mail for the first three hours from any new IP address. Hence `not _yet_ trusted, try later'. A properly-configured MTA will try again for some time, and the message will get through. (Some sites have several sending MTAs, but these will soon all have been seen at least three hours ago, so the mail will get through.) Do you have your retry duration configured well below the recommendations in Host Requirements ? Since I cannot communicate with bug report filers from chiark.greenend.org.uk, all bug reports submitted, past, present, or future, by people from that host will be summarily closed. Perhaps we should debug the mail problem first. Ian.
