Date: Wed, 6 Jul 2005 07:51:18 -0400
From: Theodore Ts'o 
To: Dean Anderson 
Cc: Brian E Carpenter ,
     JORDI PALET MARTINEZ 
Subject: Re: I'm not going to listen to this any more.


Dean,

Let me try to break it down for you:

X = "Many ISP's address blocks were labelled as spammers by
        a few spam-blocking lists (one in particular at issue for one
        particular defamation lawsuit) in an effort to pressure some ISP's
        to change their business practices"

Y = "Open Relays are a source for much spam"

You are asserting that:

1)  One person lost a civil suit for X.

2)  This person therefore asserted X falsely (and maliciously), and so
        is a "court-proven liar".

3) This "court-proven liar" also believes Y.  (Which you've never
        proved, but OK, it seems likely).

4) One or more people on the IETF list has also asserted Y.  (During
        the discussion of E-mail Submission Between Independent
        Networks I-D).

5) These people must also believe X is a good thing, and are therefore
        in the set of "court-proven liars".

6)  Therefore, Y is false.

To see why your logical reasoning doesn't make any sense, try
replacing Y with "The sky is blue".

In any case, you keep talking about IETF "associating with
court-proven liars", when at best all you can show is that there are
some people in the IETF that have made assertions that also happen to
align with statements made by various extreme elements of the
anti-SPAM crowd.  That is a very strange definition of "associating
with".  There are many people who are trying to prevent Spam on the
Internet, using a wide variety of tactics.  To say that all anti-spam
folks would condone the practices that were at issue at that
particular defamation lawsuit is not fair, not true, and not logical.

But all of this is beside the point.  Your e-mail postings have
wandered so far afield from the original message chain regarding a
particular I-D, and far afield from the IETF mailing list charter,
which is why I issued you the warning.

But I will suggest to you, outside of my scope as a mailing list
sargeant-at-arms, that if your goal is to convince people, that toning
down your rhetoric and attacking the position rather than the person,
then you will be much more effective at trying to pursuade people to
see your point of view.

For example, if you had said that, "nonsense, I set up an open relay
and I didn't notice any spammers using the open relay", at least that
would be something that could be discussed in a rational fashion.  I
would have trouble beliving such a statement, given that my mailer
logs show a huge number of spammers constantly trying to "knock at the
door" and relay spam through my mailer (to non-existant e-mail
addresses, to mailing lists, and out-and-out attempts to relay mail to
users at other hosts), but at least we could have a technical
discussion about whether or not my experience was typical or not.
Instead, you go off on your riff about court-proven liars, which is
simply not helpful to anyone, least of all to the argument that you
were trying to make.

Regards,

                                                - Ted