Wow well over 100 emails over the weekend on this topic…

For the record – I have no ties to the Spamhaus project, I don’t personally use it and I can’t say I knowingly know anyone connected to the project in any material way

Elad – your behaviour and your responses continue to be inflammatory in nature (among other things) despite a good many people saying enough now. Please just stop.

Its one thing to have an opinion and air it – I would not want to prevent this from happening but its another thing entirely when

• There is comments that “could” be considered defamatory – especially when there is limited to no evidence to prove the comment
• You continue to harass/bully/attack other members of the list just because they don’t agree with your opinion
• You are continuing to throw accusations around again without material evidence.
• You are wishing to run for a position of authority which arguably calls you to a far higher standard with regards to how you put your message across

Remember you have a right to your opinion, just like we also respectively have the right not to listen to it and/or pick it apart as long as we all keep things civilised and follow the relevant good conduct guidelines in effect.

This behaviour would quite frankly get you fired at many companies so why do you consider it acceptable here? You ultimately only are making yourself look worse

To the Ripe NCC Moderators/Admin team – if there is some formal channel that I can now make my complaint known or to request at the very least an immediate moderation of Elad Cohen’s submissions to this mailing list please urgently advise. I would like to formally agree with Cynthia and others’ complaints on this matter

Back to the “idea” that triggered this particular wave of arguments, there are a huge number of fallacies with the idea

• The required infrastructure globally would be phenomenal
• It would also require far more systems level expertise than is realised (think database replication/caching etc) – especially when you compare this to say, operating one of the root level nameservers or AS112 or RPKI
• It would for many place an unacceptable “single” point of failure in your proposed system
• Who would pay for this service? How? What is the pricing model?
• Centralising the management has issues
• DATA protection/GPDR compliance – just because its hashed doesn’t make you any less responsible
• Risk of hash collisions? – is this an issue to be concerned about?
• Like Root Certificates – getting mail client vendors to update just for your system is going to be exceptionally difficult if not impossible)

Now on the matter of centralising the running of such a system is problematic, especially when you consider that this system is fundamentally a trust based system, you are relying in faith that the responsible guardians of said systems are to be trusted to act responsibly and not to the detriment of others. For some operators in the internet space there are known issues of people doing bad stuff (BGP hijacking, internet shutdowns etc) and I know of at least one RIR (not RIPE) that has not exactly operated fully within their own constitutional mandate and processes in recent times. A good friend of mine and work colleague, Andrew Alston, recently wrote a related article about trust and centralisation as it relates to RPKI - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/rpki-things-being-considered-andrew-alston/ a lot of the comments made there probably equally apply to any proposed mail filtering solution.

To be totally frank – the only real way to solve the email spam problem is just to turn off email entirely and replace it with some other better architected solution, everything else is realistically a band-aid that people will find ways around.

Kind Regards

Anthony Somerset