[ih] Update on filtered list posts

[Andrew Sullivan]

Hi,

I'm the Internet Society's President and CEO, but I read this list at home and it's more convenient for me to reply this way, so that's what I'm doing.  (That said, if you want to tell me a thing or two about this post and want me to see it quickly, you're better off to mail me at sullivan at isoc.org, because I don't get to read this list as often as I like.)

On Tue, Sep 15, 2020 at 12:12:48PM -0700, John Gilmore via Internet-history wrote:

>The first thing the censors suppress is something they don't like.
>
>The second thing they suppress is the list of things they are suppressing.
>
>After that, you never know what they are suppressing, unless you are one
>of the ones whose voice can't be heard.

I want to be clear on a few things.

First, the Internet Society doesn't actually _operate_ this mailing list service.  We contract it out, to the same people who operate the mailing lists for the IETF, because it turns out that running very large numbers of active mailing lists is something of a specialist skill.  We're happy to provide this list a home, however, as part of our contract, because we believe the list is important and valuable for the Internet.

Second, list server providers have to walk a difficult line, because on the one hand no list operator wants to maintain a big and troublesome hand-curated set of filters; but on the other hand no list operator can afford to obtain a reputation as being unwilling to cope with the sort of spam that can get through on mailing lists.  Walking that line is a big part of the specialist skill we are paying for, and we're loathe to do a lot of second-guessing because in our experience (and that of the IETF) our vendor does a good job at this, with as light a hand as is practical.

Third, there's a reason I mention "reputation" in the above.  One of the reasons list operators need to be careful is because of the concentration in the mail market these days.  If you are a mail sender and you get on the spammy-reputation list of just one or two of the largest providers, you are in for a long slog attempting to prove to people that you have addressed whatever problem they think you have.  It is not news that the Final and Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem has not actually been discovered, so filters are what we live with, and list providers have to live in that world.  During the time that a list operator gets on someone's "spammy" list, the chances are higher that list traffic will go to a Junk mailbox, and that will trigger support tickets and so on that the provider needs to process.  That costs them money.

Finally, generating a bounce for the kind of problem that triggered the observed effect here would likely cause the reputational problem just mentioned, because backscatter remains an issue.

I think it would be exceptionally hard to find a list operator that didn't have in place at least _some_ defences, which may indeed be evaluated as "censorship" under one view of the term.  If you find one that is not, I might encourage an investigation of their success rate in getting mail to land in people's INBOX, and also some contemplation of how useful it would be to have a list that routinely ends up in the Junk mailbox in most accounts at gmail and o365 and so on.  Nevertheless, obviously, if the community actually wanted to move the list again, please rest assured that we stand by ready to help in whatever way the community wishes us to.

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at crankycanuck.ca