I am getting a bit exhausted with using everything that happens as an
example of "Sun being evil".
It's pretty straightforward here. Lot's of Sun people send mail to
lists. Moderators would rather do as little work as possible. Since
people from Sun are sending legitimate mail 99.9% of the time, many list
owners asked that we simply white list the mail to lower their workload.
We certainly would do it for all @opensolaris accounts, but at the time
we added the original one there were only about 40 accounts, so it's
didn't seem necessary. So there you go. There's my sinister plot. Cue
mustache twirling.
As for the 'what does it matter' line? Considering what a pain it is to
clean up some of these messes, we try to avoid discussing it in public.
I appreciate your expertise in this matter, but it's not your problem,
ultimately, is it?
We like to white list as many known good senders as we can, but now
we'll simply do it outside of mailman and you won't know about it.
Derek
Laurent Blume wrote:
Now, there I have a problem.
I've been told twice, privately, by people @ Sun, and in clear terms
to shut up, because I was supposedly helping the spammers by telling
them what the rules are.
I'm really upset by those advice, however well-intentioned they are.
First, as a list administrator, I was, AFAICT, not told that those
rules were put in place (unless my own antispam ate the emails, I had
such issues 2 or 3 years ago :-/ ). So my first problem is, the lack
of openness of those secret Sun rules.
Now, about the rule itself, since I was confirmed that it's Sun
employees that put it in place secretly: why?
How come Sun employees have specisl rights here? I'm not talking about
the ones working directly on OpenSolaris, but about ALL Sun employees.
Why should ALL Sun employees be allowed to post everywhere? Are they
more equal than others? Can't they be bothered to subscribe, or use
Jive, like I do myself when I need to?
Why then ALL opensolaris.org addresses are not allowed? That would
seem to be more fair to me, since ALL opensolaris.org addresses are,
at least, working on the OpenSolaris project? (yes, I know why, so
don't bother explaining).
There are two categories of citizens, and theey're not differentiated
by their work, as in the meritocracy that we're supposed to be, but by
their email addresses.
Now, I don't feel any remorse for having exposed that secret rule, so
it has to be removed from fear of spammers abusing it. I'm sorry, but
this was not right, for the two distinct reasons above.
And please, don't try again to tell me what to do, or to make me feel
guilty: you know perfectly well that I didn't actually help any
spammer in any way, since it's more than basic to harvest email
addresses from the many non protected archives, and use them at will.
If you were serious about it, you would close that gap - but some
people can't be bothered to use Jive to access the archives, right?
And FWIW, I was managing the email system of a reasonably big
government R&D agency until last month. Part of my job was to fight
spam, so I understand enough about it, and I've always told people who
wanted a whole domain allowed how stupid the idea was (though in more
polite terms).
Thank you for your attention,
Laurent
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