North American Network Operators Group
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Proposed list charter/AUP change?

  • From: Bill Nash
  • Date: Tue Jan 04 12:51:16 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