But being stuck in the past isnt doing him, or anybody else, any good.

And the basic motivation behind allowing open relay - as a courtesy to other users and operators on a trusted network, to provide extra paths in a time of highly limited connectivity, is long gone.

Staying firmly in the past just to keep the memory of those days alive?

I walk a tightrope all the time between blocking spam and delivering valid email. I need to do both. So yes valid email will get blocked from time to time - my team's job is to make my filters as fine grained as is possible (read: feasible and scalable) for me to implement without letting in far more spam than valid email. And to keep an eye out for false postivies, and for reports of false positives from our users, or from people who want to email our users, and get those false positives fixed, or worked around.

I'm actually pretty representative of the typical email postmaster at a large ISP .. I've met most of them, and they hold fairly similar views. You wont find those anathema to the EFF's mission, given that you dont like spam any more than we do, nor would you call spam free speech.

Never mind this discussion about goodmail .. several previous interactions I've had with the EFF leave me with the impression that your policy is that any server side, ISP operated spam filtering at all is bad, and is anathema with your position.

And all the examples that I've had thrown in my face to prove that position has been "bad" spam filtering - poor filtering decisions that are condemned by sensible email administrators as well.

That's about as good a way to argue as to point to a few corrupt cops, say, and then argue that the police shouldnt exist at all, and are anathema to the concept of justice.

-srs

ps: Thanks for giving me an idea. I'm probably going to do a BoF or panel somewhere this year, most likely at a maawg meeting - http://www.maawg.org .. A "top 10 no-nos for a postmaster / abuse desk operator .. and those top 10 no nos would all be quite similar to the examples of bad spam filtering I've seen from the EFF <- save of course the reasoning that all blocking of poorly managed political lists is a right wing plot .. our filters, based on user complaints and a few other things, are not too particular about the political color of a badly managed list.