RE: 7. Best Practices (was RE: [Asrg] Trustic anti-spam system closes down because it doesn 't work)

[Daniel Feenberg <feenberg@nber.org>]

On Wed, 6 Aug 2003, Bob Wyman wrote:

> Yakov Shafranovich wrote:
> > Within a consent framework, the individual administrator
> > or developer would choose which sources of information to rely on.
> 	It should be recognized that if someone other than the actual
> recipient of mail is making the decisions about how mail is to be
> filtered, then there exists a possibility for inappropriate filtering of
> messages (or censorship). Thus, I'm somewhat concerned when you suggest
> it is "admistrator or developer" who would choose what "sources of
> information" to rely on. I believe the individual should always be
> provided a means to override or block any such third party decisions
> about what they should be seeing.
> 

The individual, through his choice of ISP or DNSBL, makes the
determination of the mail policy. It is wrong to ignore the user choice of
ISP, and claim that the ISP or DNSBL decision is censorship by a third
party. The constant drumbeat of "censorship" cries is merely an attempt to
prevent users from obtaining help in rejecting spam, and given the
technical difficulties involved in do-it-yourself spam reduction, can only
be classified as pro-spam propaganda. 

As long as the user chooses the ISP or DNSBL, censorship is not happening.
I should add, that the user is the one paying for the service - not the
one writing the message. This is the old IBM definition of the user, and
the correct one in this context.

Daniel Feenberg



_______________________________________________
Asrg mailing list
Asrg@ietf.org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg