Re: Spam?

[Richard Kulawiec <rsk () gsp org>]

On Thu, Jul 14, 2011 at 06:48:54PM +1200, Don Gould wrote:
> OMG can't you people run proper spam filtering on your own mail
> servers that filter out the nanog messages that are spam?!

One of the fundamental principles of spam mitigation is that blocking
is usually best (in terms of: efficacy, accuracy, resource minimization,
and other metrics) when applied as close to the source as possible.
In the case of mailing lists, such as this one, it has been a best practice
for many years to only permit traffic from subscribers (and optionally,
from individually-listed addresses, which are often alternate addresses
for subscribers).   It is clear that a serious mistake was made during
the attempted migration of this list, i.e., this best practice was not
followed, thus allowing some number of messages from non-subscribers to
reach some number of subscribers.  The proper solution to this is most
emphatically not to ask the thousands of NANOG subscribers to adjust
their mail systems; the proper solution is to continue to employ this
best practice.

---rsk