Proposed list charter/AUP change?

Tue Jan 4 17:51:05 UTC 2005

On Mon, 3 Jan 2005, Steve Sobol wrote:
> Susan keeps on claiming spam is offtopic for Nanog, yet the AUP/Charter/FAQ 
> don't mention spam other than telling us not to ask "I'm being spammed, how 
> can I make it stop?"
>
> If it's flat-out offtopic, no matter what, or if the majority of list members 
> don't want to talk about it on the list, why hasn't the FAQ been updated? Or 
> does Merit just want us to try to guess what is offtopic?
>

Spam represents a significant percentage of email traffic, and its 
delivery is increasingly via trojaned dsl/broadband devices. Even spam 
delivered from quasi-legitimate sources is usually an abuse of resources 
that some NSP/ISP is paying for. Discussion of functional spam control at 
the ISP level, I think, is absolutely on topic for a list of this scope. 
Please note, that I say 'functional'. Random complaints would obviously 
not fall into this category.

Examples would include:
Working enterprise-scale spam filtering (Hourly mail volume measured in 
thousands)
Discussion of edge/core SMTP filtering to curtail spam sources.
Policy discussions for handling domestic and international spam sources.
Implementation, or requests for implementation, of SPF and similiar 
controls.
Inter-network cooperation for handling large scale issues.

I think this last is pretty much exactly what a list like this is for, be 
it spam, regional power outages, BGP shenanigans, or widespread squirrel 
detonations.

- billn