important people (!) unable to use sourceware

[Mark Galassi <rosalia@lanl.gov>]

Amigos, I'd like to propose that we drop the current RBL scheme for
blacklisting.

A few things have me thinking about it:

1. I'm in Italy for a couple of months and it turns out that TIN (the
   Italian telecom's ISP, which is by far the biggest here) is
   blacklisted.  This is kind of selfish and whine-ey, so let me go
   on:

2. Norm Walsh, the most important person in the DocBook world, is on
   our docbook-tools list.  He's one of the most agreeable people
   you'll ever meet, and he just wrote me this:


> I'm certainly interested. I have a real problem with this
> mailing list though. It turns out that the ISP I use when I
> travel, and I travel too much ;-), has been blacklisted by
> whatever service this mailing list uses to avoid spammers. So I
> can't post here when I'm on the road.

> I'm so pissed about this that I'm "this close" to unsubscribing.

Since I'm going through the same stuff, I fully agree with him, and I
feel embarassed offering the sourceware services to the person I
really want to participate in my list.  And to think I was so honored
when he joined...  Without him my "next generation DocBook thrust"
will be severely diminished.

3. It turns out that the mechanism for white-listing a person
   (i.e. allowing him through even if his ISP is black-listed) does
   not do the job for me or for Norman or for anyone who uses an ISP
   when traveling: Jason says you can't blank out a whole range of IP
   address -- you can only blank them out one at a time.  Almost all
   ISPs give you a dynamic IP address....

4. When traveling I usually work offline, and I suspect others do too.
   I wrote a dozen or more messages on three sourceware lists last
   night, connected to send them off, and found that they had *all*
   bounced.  This makes the problem even worse in the case where it
   manifests itself more easily.

This makes me think that our criteria are too harsh, too much of a
blanket statement, and that they get in the way of work instead of
promoting it.

Is there a better way?  Who's a scholar on spam blacklisting?

I would propose that a "requirement" on the system be that people be
able to travel and hook up their laptops to major ISPs and still use
our system.  Unfortunately outside the US it is not really an option
to telnet back home to send email: things are too slow and people have
to work offline.