Re: [alac] Why there are chronic delays on mail to the ICANN ALAC list

[kent@xxxxxxxxx]

On Tue, Oct 17, 2006 at 12:03:16PM -0400, John L wrote:
> Kent introduced them deliberately, because he thinks they're good for us.
> 
> No, I am not making this up.

Yes, unfortunately, you are.  You should be ashamed of yourself for
misrepresenting what I said, and also for redistributing a private message. 

Everyone:

The situation (reflected clearly in what I wrote below) is as follows:

Messages coming in to icann addresses are handled in round robin fashion by 4
email gateways.  All incoming mail is "greylisted" (a very common anti-spam
measure).  Greylisting delays a message for a short, configurable, time, and
spammers drop the connection, while legitimate mailers retry shortly, and 
the message is then accepted.  Once a sender has made it through the 
greylist process they are whitelisted, which means that they are no longer 
delayed.  

But unfortunately, the 4 gateways whitelist independently, which means that
if you by chance hit another gateway, you will be greylisted again.  This
could be addressed by a central whitelist service (and in other contexts I
have implemented such things), but one of the design goals of the gateway
structure was independent redundancy -- ICANN runs on email, and we didn't
want to have a single point of failure for incoming mail.

I do have an alternate method for dealing with this issue, but it needs to 
be implemented, and there are lots of other things that need to be 
implemented as well.

So, to sum up, this was NOT implemented because I thought delays were "good
for you" -- it was implemented to deal with spam.

My question to John was a serious one, though -- I was trying to come up 
with some real information about how delays interact with mailing lists.  
It's not really a topic for this list, but if people want to discuss this 
matter, I'm eager to get input.

ICANN supports a global environment, with people in many different timezones,
and different internet environments.  Near realtime response to an email is
simply too much to expect, and you can't realistically maintain an
interactive conversation without leaving some people out.  That is, in a
uniformly distributed global list, realtime conversation invoving all parties
is not possible.

Looking at the alac and the alac-admin lists, there are about 70 real
messages so far this month in alac, 155 in alac-admin.  That's ~ 5/day in
alac, and ~ 10/day in alac-admin -- on average 2-3 hours between messages. 
In looking at the messages, the content doesn't seem to be generally affected
by any delays.

So, to paraphrase the serious question quoted below:

What, specifically, are the problems that people see with the delays?  How 
noticable are they?  Are they more significant than, say, the fact that a 
correspondent in europe may be asleep at the moment?

I don't want to pollute this list with off topic stuff, but I would be 
interested in any comments or insights on this issue.

Best Regards
Kent

> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 07:35:09 -0700
> From: kent <kent@xxxxxxxxx>
> To: John L <johnl@xxxxxxxx>
> Subject: Re: [alac-admin] Re: E-mail spam alert...
> 
> On Tue, Oct 17, 2006 at 12:54:09AM -0400, John L wrote:
> >>greylist-milter.  The milter does whitelist addresses, but we have 4
> >>round-robin mail gateways, and there isn't a global whitelist database.
> >>Frequent correspondents don't get delayed much, since they usually hit all
> >>4
> >>gateways within the whitelist decay -- I make it pretty long to help that.
> >
> >The delays are a chronic problem on the ALAC lists.
> 
> Our perspectives may differ on this :-) and I would be interested to hear
> your thoughts.
> 
> One of ICANN's fundamental goals is to collect reasoned opinions.  One of 
> the
> longest standing complaints about ICANN's email lists has been that they
> fostered mindless back and forth rather than thoughtful comments.  ICANN has
> tried a number different approaches.  We used straight email lists for a
> while -- they degenerated into flamefests.  We used a web-based comment 
> forum for
> a while -- that was just as bad.  We noticed that any highly interactive 
> mechanism
> tends to foster back and forth ungoverned conversations with tendencies to
> go off in wild directions.  Making things *less* interactive, as in the
> current comment forum mechanism, has been far more successful in collecting
> meaningful input.
> 
> The alac seems to be a relatively polite bunch, but one could argue that's
> just a function of the current membership dynamics.
> 
> So, when you say that the delays are a chronic problem, I would be
> interested to know precisely what you see that problem to be.  I certainly
> agree that the delays may be chronic.  But why is that a problem?  Are there
> really occasions where a half hour delay is a serious issue?