Re: Dan Bernstein's issues about namedroppers list operation

[James M Galvin <galvin@elistx.com>]

On Fri, 10 Jan 2003, Thomas Narten wrote:

    Executive summary: I see no evidence that Randy is censoring postings
    from Dan. It is the case that some of his messages do not appear to
    have made it out on namedroppers, but it is unclear why this is.
    Furthermore, given that most of these missing messages were cc'ed to
    other lists (i.e., the ietf and iesg lists), there is no evidence of
    censorship.

I do not agree that your concluding statement follows from the prior
two.  Such a conclusion suggests it would be acceptable for a list owner
to forward to the IETF list all messages that they do not want to
distribute to their WG mailing list to obviate all claims of censorship.
Worse, originators could cc the IETF list on all messages "just in
case."

It should be the case that the merits of a claim of censorship are
judged in the context of the mailing list at issue, not in the joining
of the contexts of the "ietf", "iesg", or other mailing lists with the
mailing list at issue.

    Namedroppers is a posters-only mailing list that is run in conformance
    with the policies outlined in
    http://www.ietf.cnri.reston.va.us/IESG/STATEMENTS/mail-submit-policy.txt.

According to your description of how the mailing list operates it most
certainly is not in conformance with the policy.

    Specifically, all mail sent to namedroppers is:

    1) first run through spamassassin. Mail that is rejected here is not
       archived, as the number of such messages is large. All mail sent to
       mailing lists on the server hosting namedroppers is run though
       spamassassin, so this is not a namedroppers-specific procedure.

The policy does not permit messages to be run through spamassassin
first.  Messages from subscribers and other known addresses are approved
first.  That is clearly stated in the first principle.  It is
non-subscriber messages that are subject to review.

The fact that spamassassin is applied at the point of SMTP submission to
the server may be the basis for an exception from the point of view of
the IESG but it is wrong to represent it as otherwise.

    It does appear that *some* of the message that Dan has sent to
    namedroppers have not appeared on the namedroppers mailing list. But
    it is unclear why that happened. At the time of these postings, some
    of his other messages have gone through.

This fact alone suggests a problem.  While it may not be censorship (and
I have no evidence to suggest it is) you can not conclusively say there
is no censorship.  Perhaps the spamassassin is overzealous in its
rankings.  This is trivial to prove or disprove by simply manually
running one of Dan's messages through the spamassassin on the server in
question.  If it rejects the message we will know why and we will know
the exception to the first principle is suspect.  If it does not then
again there is a problem somewhere.

Based on your description of the overall operation if the spamassassin
does not reject the message the only thing left to be at fault is the
"reviewers."  Are they simply making mistakes in their haste or is it
censorship?  Or is there another point in the process that could
objectively the problem?

    It is unclear why those messages did not make it to namedroppers,
    but now that Dan's posting address is in the the list of know
    posters for namedroppers, and his mail seems to be getting through,
    it seems best to just keep an eye on further problems and
    investigate them as soon as they happen (e.g, when relevant logs are
    available). I see no evidence that Randy (or anyone else) is
    singling out anyone's postings for rejection.

I'm no fan of Dan Bernstein's "whippings" but your message has not
adequately responded to the issue.

Jim