RE: [chairs] SPAM

["Wachob, Gabe" <gwachob@visa.com>]

Norm-
	I think you are in the same situation as I am with my personal email address. 
	That is, I've reached a steady state of about 80% spam.. I could *hand* my email address to spammers and I don't think I could get more spam. I'd make a good bet that the bulk of all spammers out there have my email address. So I have extreme filtering that blocks about 90% of the spam I get -- which means I still get 8% and 20% ham getting through my filters - not great, but manageable. 

	My *visa* account, on the other hand, which is plastered all over Oasis, doesn't get that many spam, at least not that many that get through the visa spam filters I know nothing about.. 

	I tend to agree with you about the extreme importance of being able to reply to the email addresses of senders on oasis email lists. 

	I think the difference with OASIS and other public email archives is that Oasis, by virtue of its membership system, uses your email address as a sort of identity, so you can't create email addresses that are specific to the email account (which may be different than your protected primary email address). Often times, folks create email-list-specific email aliases which allow for more narrower filtering. OASIS doesn't allow this sort of aliasing, even if your email hosting *does*. I think thats something else that could be changed that would ameliorate the spam issue...

	Here's a radical idea: what about having oasis assign email aliases for all TC members which could be posted publicly.. So that we could apply different, stricter filtering policies if we get email sent to those email aliases..

	-Gabe

-----Original Message-----
From: Norman Walsh [mailto:ndw@nwalsh.com]
Sent: Tuesday, April 13, 2004 4:53 PM
To: karl.best@oasis-open.org
Cc: Eve L. Maler; chairs@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: Re: [chairs] SPAM


/ "Karl F. Best" <karl.best@oasis-open.org> was heard to say:
| That's part of what I'm trying to figure out: how often and how
| important is it for the guy on the street to be able to respond to a
| person who wrote a message? When would someone respond privately
| rather than by sending a comment to the TC?

I consider it extremely important. I rely on being able to point to
messages in the archives in agendas and in the course of discussions.
I think it is unacceptable to adopt any strategy that obscures the
sender in a way that prevents a human from decoding it through
inspection.

I'll wager I get as much spam as anyone on this list. I actually keep
track of it and my filters have caught in excess of twenty-three
thousand (23,000) pieces of spam since the first of April:

Date        Totl Ham  Spam %
2004-04-01: 2818 0758 2060 26.90
2004-04-02: 2603 0721 1882 27.70
2004-04-03: 1723 0295 1428 17.12
2004-04-04: 1699 0427 1272 25.13
2004-04-05: 3023 0864 2159 28.58
2004-04-06: 2808 0877 1931 31.23
2004-04-07: 3211 0960 2251 29.90
2004-04-08: 2439 0784 1655 32.14
2004-04-09: 2789 0679 2110 24.35
2004-04-10: 1289 0235 1054 18.23
2004-04-11: 3137 0609 2528 19.41
2004-04-12: 1106 0295 0811 26.67
2004-04-13: 3200 1085 2115 33.91

Obfuscating the archives is a bad idea and is the wrong place to
attack this problem. I also don't believe it would have an iota of
impact on the amount of spam I receive (admittedly a somewhat selfish
observation). Perhaps I would feel differently if I believed
otherwise, but I doubt it.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM / XML Standards Architect / Sun Microsystems, Inc.
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