[ih] Correct name for early TCP/IP working group?

[Jack Haverty]

Well... I disagree, or at least don't understand.

Last year when I was receiving complaints that some people weren't 
getting my email, I learned more than I ever wanted to know about those 
"munging mechanisms" such as DMARC, SPF, PGP, et al.  It's a mess, and 
it seems that mailing lists can no longer be considered reliable as more 
and more "anti-spam" measures are created.

IMHO, "doing it right" by breaking digital signatures negates a 
mechanism that might reduce spam.  With such signatures, it possible to 
determine that a message actually came from the person who seems to have 
sent it.

In this case, "doing it right" contradicts other IETF-driven work which 
might alleviate email spam, e.g.:
https://www.openpgp.org/about/standard/

That doesn't seem "right" to me.    ISOC doesn't even sign the altered 
messages it send to the list, to confirm that the ISOC server was the 
actual source.

Such strategy likely motivates people to migrate to other 
closed-community systems, e.g., Whatsapp or its competitors.

IMHO, most people, governments, corporations, and others would probably 
agree that spam is a serious and worsening problem with the Internet.   
If ISOC agrees, they could use their own systems to define, develop, 
debug, test, and then showcase how to "do it right" - as ARPA and NSF 
did back in the early days.

Jack

On 1/31/25 16:46, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history wrote:
> Jack,
>
> Back when 95% (or whatever the exact fraction is) of email wasn't spam,
> mailing list operators didn't have to do anything special. But today,
> every mailing list operator has to either do a number of things that
> involve munging messages in one way or another, to avoid anti-spam
> mechanisms used by all the major email provders, or give up and close
> the lists. An expert on this such as John Levine could explain many
> of those munging mechanisms, so I won't try. But ISOC's choice is to
> rewrite the nominal sender of the mail to match the actual sender, i.e.
>    Jack Haverty via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org>
> for your messages, so naturally they will not be signed by you when they
> reach subscribers. That's "doing it right" in the era of pervasive spam.
>
> As for:
>
>>>> Large items should be posted via links to other storage sites.
>
> Surely people here of all people are aware that mailing list archives
> are a very poor method of digital conservation. For example, many
> (probably most) IETF WG mail archives prior to the lists being hosted
> at ietf.org are incomplete or lost.
>
> Regards
>    Brian Carpenter
>
> On 01-Feb-25 08:10, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:
>> Thanks, Joe.  I didn't remember ISOC's specific limitations until I got
>> the rejection report, which said the message was too big.   So I quickly
>> converted the photo into a smaller size of 80KB, to fit well within the
>> 400KB constraint, and resent it.  The second try made it through the
>> list server, but the image was stripped away with no indication that it
>> had ever been there.  I realize you can't do anything about it and
>> sympathize.
>>
>> Apparently the ISOC service silently censors and alters messages as they
>> pass through.   The recipients don't get what I sent.  It also breaks my
>> digital signature.   I'm disappointed that ISOC, as parent of the
>> Engineering arm of the Internet, doesn't use its own services as
>> showcase models of "best practice" to demonstrate how to "do it right",
>> as ARPA, NSF, et al did back in the early days of the Internet.
>>
>> Jack Haverty
>>
>> On 1/31/25 07:40, touch at strayalpha.com wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Jan 30, 2025, at 11:27 PM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history
>>>> <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> [trying again... furst try was rejected "Message too big." The
>>>> Internet can now handle gigabit speeds, but apparently not emails
>>>> more than 400 kilobytes?]
>>>
>>> That’s correct; as has been noted before, this list is for discussions
>>> but is not a storage archive.
>>>
>>> Large items should be posted via links to other storage sites.
>>>
>>> Joe (list admin)
>>
>>

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