In message <DB7PR06MB56438B99D23B236E688EA3C4943E0@DB7PR06MB5643.eurprd06.prod.outlook.com>, Brian Nisbet <brian.nisbet@heanet.ie> wrote:
This is an open mailing list for the RIPE Anti-Abuse Working Group where a variety of matters, including policy, are discussed.
It is not, nor hopefully will it ever be, a closed list with vetting etc.
Brian's open-mindedness is heartwarnming, however if Scott Richter were to one day wander in here, using a mysterious alias and posting from a domain that has nothing that could be seriously called a web site, then my hope would be that someone, at least, would cry foul. And if no one else did, than I most certainly would. I don't like sock puppets, whether they be Russians trying to influence elections, covertly, or stealthy South African providers of bulk email services. If there are "ringers" being sent in, here or elsewhere, with the goal of influencing discussions without disclosing their actual interests, then that's quite clearly a violation of the RIPE Code of Conduct, as well as an affront to everyone here. Since Brian is apparently perfectly OK with having exactly such sock puppets around, it now falls to me to make plain the actual business interests of our resident troll, Mr. Andre. It is only a very short set of steps, starting from the domain main.me, and its WHOIS history, as provided by the whoxy.com web site, to find out, despite his/her/its various efforts to prevent it, that our Mr. Andre is directly and irrefutably associated with (and presumably here representing) the following commercial enterprise. This commercial enterprise, as you can all see, offers bulk emailing services: https://nkosi.co.za/ It's not at all clear from the minimalist description of the services offered which IP addresses or domain names are being used for these bulk emailing services. But given that Mr. Andre chastized me, just recently, for my purported failure to "move packets in the RIPE region" I think that it is a safe bet that he is doing so himself, and perhaps even from the network of Hetzner, a network which he has held himself up to be an authority on. (How did he come to believe that he knew so much about Hetzner unless he was either a Hetzner customer or a Hetzner supplier?) I think that the members should take these facts into consideration when evaluating the opinions of our Mr. Andre. I am compelled to point out also Mr. Andre's own published written opinions on the proper definition of spam. Mr. Andre's preferred definition appears to allow for "one time" invitations to be blasted to everyone in the universe. Nonetheless, in Mr. Andre's considered opinion, "Email Spam is not the same as Spam Abuse" and a "... one time request should not be considered spam abuse.": https://ascams.com/email-marketing/ Leaving aside Mr. Andre's opinions regarding the proper definition of the term "spam", I am compelled also to point out that this mailing list is by no means the first one that he has trolled and disrupted. In April of 2016, he also injected himself into the Linux Autralia "linuix-aus" mailing list, where he proceeded to inform the participants that he had invented the "Final Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem" (FUSSP - see https://www.dmuth.org/fussp/) and that he would be more than happy to share it with Linux Australia if they would only allow him to plug his magical and wonderous black box spam filter into Linux Autralia's email infrastructure: http://lists.linux.org.au/pipermail/linux-aus/2016-April/thread.html For some reason, the various fans of open source software on that mailing list were less than enthused about the proposed closed-source "ultimate solution" their spam problems, and thus, Mr. Andre and his proposal and his mysterious black box "solution" were quite appropriately derided, laughed at, and encouraged to go elsewhere. (Mr. Andre, of course asserted that anyone and everyone who didn't immediately buy into his miraculous new anti-spam invention were quite certainly "bullies".) After that, Mr. Andre either was forcably ejected from that mailing list or else he himself elected to quitely slink off, never to be heard from again.... ... until some months later when he resurfaced, in October 2016, of all places, on the mailing lists of the Philladelphia Lunix User's Group (PLUG) where he took it upon himself to correct the ill-informed views of every member there who thought that it might be time to start blacklisting some entire highly spam-ridden TLDs. It's not really clear what personal interest our Mr. Andre might have, or might have had, back in 2016, in preserving the unfettered ability to send email from such sterling TLD's as .XYZ, but he obviously had a burning interest in this one issue, and spent considerable time explaining to numerous other mailing list participants, ad nauseum, exactly why and how they were all stupid and "bullies" if they did not elect to agree with his views on this issue: http://lists.netisland.net/archives/plug/plug-2016-10/maillist.html Lastly as some of you may have noticed, our Mr. Andre, unlike EVERY other participant here on this mailing list, has quite obviously been reluctant to share with any of us his surname. I don't even need to speculate about why that might be and/or who or what Mr. Andre may be hiding from. I'll just leave that as an exercise for the reader. Use your imagination. The bottom line is that Mr. Andre is here under false pretenses, in violation of the RIPE Code of Conduct, and is directly associated with a commercial enterprise that provides bulk email services. He's published his views about the proper definition of spam on a web site that he appears to own and operate himself, so nobody needs to have any doubts about what those views are. Even if we generously overlook all of that, Mr. Andre's past propensity for dropping in and disrupting mailing lists (primarily by his insistance on endlessly debating a number of perfectly ridiculous notions) is every bit as evident as it is also a matter of public historical record. The (Co-)Chairman and the rest of you can continue to feed this troll and provide him with additional entertainment. I myself will decline to do so regardles of what further falsehoods or perfectly idiotic assertions he/she/it may make here. Regards, rfg