Re: [Paddlewise] PaddleWise list censorship

[ moderator intervening - spam is ugly thus the word spam triggers moderation ]

On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 09:03:46AM -0600, Martin, Jack wrote:
> My concern with the apparent governance of the list is that my few
> posts may or may not appear on PaddleWise, and, if they do appear,
> it's frequently many hours if not days after they were sent.

There are multiple possible causes for this, one of which is "human
being(s) in the loop reviewing messages before letting them through".

Among the other possible causes are ordinary delays in email.  The SMTP
protocol which transmits email is NOT designed to provide real-time
performance; while it may do so under some ideal circumstances some of
the time, it should never be counted on to do so under general conditions.

As I've put it in haiku form:

	Mail is not the web
	Mail is not for file transfer
	Mail is not I M

Moreover, many mail system operators have adopted strategies that
*deliberately* impose significant delays on email tranmission and
reception as they attempt to cope with an environment where at _least_
95% of all traffic is abuse: spam, viruses, worms, backscatter, etc.

And on top of all that, the general level of clue among mail system
operators has unfortunately declined rather sharply in the last decade,
leading to a surprisingly large number of situations where issues with
reliable/timely mail delivery pointed out by of X should actually be
laid at the feet of the people running the mail server(s) that X uses.

Thus, the cause could be:

	- botched mail system config on your end
	- botched mail system config on the list server
	- anti-spam mitigation in place on your end
	- anti-spam mitigation in place on the list server
	- network issues between you and them
	- botched or inconsistent DNS config on your end
	- botched or inconsistent DNS config on the list server
	- etc.

or more than one or something else that I haven't listed here.

As an example entirely unrelated to *this* list, I recently
received and investigated a complaint from a member of a list
that's hosted on my servers.  This person said that there was
a consistent three-hour delay in messages delivered to them,
and excoriated me for my "incompetence".  It turns out that
the delay was due to this person's own mail server, which was
imposing a 3-hour graylisting period on all incoming traffic,
and thus the cause of his difficulties was sitting in a computer
room just down the hall from him.

I have no idea what's in play here because I haven't done
any investigation.  But I would caution against drawing any
conclusions, and would certainly caution against throwing out
the word "censorship", until all the facts are known and
carefully analyzed.

---Rsk
day job: Senior Internet Security Architect
participant, Internet Engineering Task Force Anti-Spam Research Group
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