On Saturday, 6 September 2025 21:31:58 Central European Summer Time Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote: > Might just be me but I think that anyone who sends out nasty legalistic > demand letters to people who hit 'reply all' on a mailing list should be > banned. The action is rude and arrogant for a start, it is intimidating and > unpleasant. And I see no particular need to allow such people to make other > people tolerate that behavior. > > The details of the legalistic demands are irrelevant, nobody has time to > read that sort of nonsense. > > Spam control is something I have quite a bit of experience of and the > reason we rejected approaches like qsecretary is they are a very good way > to find yourself being blocked or banned. What the people using them are > doing is shifting their spam problem onto everyone else. I think there's also a lot to be said about the response that one might have to such a letter. I think a lot of us would not just be intimidated, but have our own speech chilled by it too. What I did here was to just not have Mr. Bernstein in the recipients anymore. I couldn't care less (try me in my jurisdiction, Belgium is not known for its lack of those things), but I think many people would be scared and just fold. I think that runs counter to both the concept of unimpeded free speech (as argued in other threads), and to the idea of seeking broader participation. I also doubt that this is what Keith had in mind when he wrote that (quite agreeable) passage. I have written a message blocking program in the past too, not for email but for Telegram. I published it under https://git.nixmagic.com/vim/telelog. There too, I would have a bunch of unsolicited messages asking me to "hack this Facebook account" and whatnot. And after the hundredth time, I got quite frustrated with it! But after many methods of dealing with it that, looking back, were absolutely unacceptable, this so-called userbot is what I settled with. It just sends a response, blocks the user, and that's the end of it. No annoying notification to the recipient, records are still there, sender knows what to do (in that case, just write to me in the group we always had in common). In mailing lists, that would just be writing to me through the mailing list I guess. But I find the signal-to-noise ratio here to be much better. On ietf@xxxxxxxxxxxx, I pretty much never receive spam. And the rest is just because I published the email address on a website somewhere, and that I run nixmagic.com as a catch-all. I don't see any reason to run something as invasive as qsecretary or even telelog here. -- Met vriendelijke groet, Michael De Roover Mail: ietf@xxxxxxxxxxxx Web: michael.de.roover.eu.org -- vim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx.ideapad.internal
